Jeremy Cherfas talks to Laura Valli about porridge, and the Estonian porridge café she helped to found, on the latest episode of Eat This Podcast.

Ten top simple field recording tips from Cities and Memory; includes:

You might think that’s only a gentle breeze, and it can’t possibly do anything to your recording, but IT WILL. Even a light wind sounds like someone’s ripped your mic in half, and will render your recording unusable. Use wind shields, use shelter, avoid wind at all costs.

The recording here is a classic example of it: riding our bicycles by the metal fence surrounding the Charlottetown Event Grounds on Saturday, I noticed the the gusty winds were making beautiful music through the slats. So I pulled out my phone and pressed “record,” trying to shield it from the wind. I failed. So you’ll have to take my word for it.

See also diy (do it yourself) from Quiet American.

Link provenance: William Denton to Radio Apogee to this exhortation to make field recordings of decent quality.

A couple of years ago I wrote about how the CBC was A/B testing different headlines on its local news website. They’re back at it again today, testing the headlines “P.E.I. plastic bag recycling cut ‘to almost nothing’ by ban” and “P.E.I. plastic bag recycling troubles disappear with ban” on this story:

Using the little hack I wrote back when this first appeared, you can see which headline is “winning” (which is to say “most clicked upon by readers”):

I’d love to sit in on the meeting where the results of this test were discussed: if “to almost nothing” is the winner, what would the instruction to headline writers be?

From my friend Vivian comes a pointer to Our Happy Life, an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture that closes this week:

The exhibition Our Happy Life is a three-act study on the new spatial models founded on the measurement of happiness; including a dissection of the political project behind methods of city data collection and application, an investigation of the emotional component of the real estate market, and a demystification of the idea of social space. Our Happy Life is a narrative anti-manual which explores and interprets recent paradigms that are shaping our present perception of place, giving new identity to the materials of the private space of our homes, reconceiving our working environments, and transforming development itself through the planning of our cities.

Photo by Vivan Beer
Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism
Installation view, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 2019. © CCA

Oliver and I have now been bicycling to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market every Saturday for two months.

Since we began in August, quite literally from a standing start, the weather has turned cool and the trail’s gotten a little muddy, but Oliver’s cycling has improved, bit by bit, every week.

As the University of PEI is only a few hundred metres up the trail, every Thursday we also cycle the same route up to campus for Oliver’s Thursday afternoon class.

Our only real issue now (other than the incline from Joe Ghiz Park to the 1911 Jail, which we both complain about every time we encounter it uphill), is that I haven’t found a safe way to transport Ethan the Dog with us, so he’s had to stay home on Saturdays and Thursdays.

We’re going to try and keep this up until the snow means we can’t.

The temporary death of our refrigerator (it died completely; then, after a 12 hour rest and defrost, sprang back to life) resulted in a lot of spoiled food (sigh) and an opportunity to really clean out the fridge and freezer (yeah!).

So before supper I made a bicycle run, with trailer in tow, up to Sobeys to replenish our larder.

After supper it became obvious that I had left out several important things, like danishes and toilet paper. So I got back on the bike and rode back to Sobeys. I didn’t need the trailer for this run, but I did need something to hold the groceries, so I snapped a pannier onto the bike.

Which is how I came to discover that bicycle panniers snap equally as well onto the side of Sobeys grocery carts, providing not only a handy place to stick the pannier while shopping, but also an easy way to load up the pannier at the cash.

See also How to Pronounce Pannier.

At the federal candidates forum on environmental issues on October 3, 2019 at the University PEI, here’s what Liberal incumbent Sean Casey finished with (emphasis mine):

I want to talk now to progressive voters, and I think everyone here would put themselves in that category. On October 22, Canada’s going to have Prime Minister Andrew Scheer or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 

I think that anyone that honestly believes that there’s a third possibility probably isn’t following the news. There’s only one way to stop Andrew Scheer, and anyone that cares about progressive values will want to stop Andrew Sheer. 

Is the risk of voting with your heart worth it?

Cynical fear-mongering aside, the calculus of this doesn’t made sense.

A vote for Sean Casey results in, well, more Sean Casey.

No matter the national result, a vote for Green candidate Darcie Lanthier — the “voting with your heart” option, in Mr. Casey’s take, I imagine — results in effective representation from an enthusiastic new legislator as part of a larger Green caucus working to leverage Green values into Parliament’s agenda, and an MP who will not only work hard for Charlottetown, but is sure to be a national figure.

That not only seems like a vote my heart can live with, but makes a lot of sense to my head as well.

(Video clip from Environmental Coalition of PEI Livestream of the meeting)

Detective Harry Holman and the Case of the Mystery Yacht:

We are left with a three-masted steam yacht with no name. What was it and what was it doing in Charlottetown Harbour?

Thelma does Stoic Week:

My life as a carer means I need to also take care of myself, but that’s not something I or most other carers do well. Stoic Week is a short burst of study and practice that helps me build resilience and critical thinking. Tell Seneca I sent you.

Perhaps I will join her

I made the decision to vote for Darcie Lanthier on July 15 at 8:15 p.m.

I was sitting on a rickety set of wooden stairs on the side of Riverside Drive. This was my view:

I was in the middle of a midsummer evening bicycle ride, out Riverside Drive to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, and then along the riverside path to the Hillsborough Hospital. On the way back home I stopped to make a sketch of the Energy from Waste Plant:

I like the simplicity of industrial architecture, and the sun was catching the plant in just the right way that night.

As I was sketching, Darcie Lanthier appeared out of nowhere, on her electric bicycle, returning home, it turned out, from a visit to Hillsborough Park. She got off her bike and we chatted for 20 minutes or so about all manner of things: electric bicycles, how annoying it is that left-hand turn lanes in Charlottetown can’t sense the presence of bicycles, the upcoming federal election and her candidacy in it; we may even have talked about the pros and cons of waste incineration. In fact I’m pretty certain we did.

As the mosquitoes started to get bad, and the sun started to go down, we bid adieu, Darcie sped off, and I made my decision to vote Green this fall.

This morning, at the special poll at Holland College, while bicycling home from the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market, that’s exactly what I did:

(As an aside, not only is it great for students that Elections Canada has special polls set up on the Holland College and UPEI campuses, but any elector can choose to vote there, and because these polls are smaller, quieter, and less crowded, they turn out to be a great place to vote, especially if you are challenged by the relative cacophony of regular polling places).

Perhaps, given my public support of Karla Bernard in this spring’s provincial general election, it comes as little surprise that I chose to vote Green. But my choice was by no means an automatic one.

Here are the factors that went into it.

Elizabeth May

By almost any measure, Elizabeth May is the preeminent leader of a federal party in Canada right now. She is an experienced parliamentarian, intelligent, deeply thoughtful, an excellent communicator, an inspiring leader. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing her speak three times in the last 6 months, twice during the provincial campaign, and once at a rally for Darcie earlier this federal campaign.

I am passionate about many issues, none more so than the need to address the climate crisis, and there is no doubt that, of the federal leaders, May is the one with the deepest understanding of the science, the implications, and the need to adapt how we live and behave. She comes by this honestly, from a lifetime of concern for and action on the environment and social justice.

In this climate crisis, I want Elizabeth May at the centre of Canada’s response, whether in government or opposition.

The Greens

Both viscerally and by more technical measure, I am aligned with Green Party of Canada policies and priorities; here’s my Vote Compass result:

The Green Party platform for this election is not a platform in the traditional sense; like the PEI Greens platform this spring, it is presented as a blueprint for 2030 and beyond:

This is our platform. It is not a conventional set of political promises. It represents a vision for Canada in 2030, which has been sorely missing in public discourse. Our platform commitments represent the types of policy changes needed to make this vision a reality.

Why 2030?

The world’s climate scientists say that by 2030 we must be halfway towards the goal of virtually eliminating climate-changing pollution – primarily carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – by 2050. If we miss the 2030 target, we risk triggering runaway global warming.

2030 is also the deadline for the reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These are a set of 17 goals designed to lift people out of poverty, provide everyone with clean water and air, food security and education, and ensure a livable climate. Canada is committed to these goals, but has no plan to get there. The Green Party endorses these goals and has a plan. Throughout the platform, you will see icons beside those policies that align with the 17 SDGs.

The climate emergency must be the lens through which every policy envelope is viewed – the economy, health, education, foreign affairs, immigration, public safety, defence, social welfare, transportation.

This approach aligns with my own affinity for systems thinking, for an ecological mindset, for seeing problems not in isolation but as interrelated.

The Greens in a Minority Government

After the final results were in for the April 2019 provincial general election, I got an email from my father, asking me how I felt about the “Green party’s loss in the election.”

I was taken aback by the question: although the Greens in PEI didn’t form government, the election saw 8 Green MLAs elected and the party forming official opposition. This was, to my mind, not only a significant achievement, but also preferable, in many ways, to forming government: government is hard, especially so for a relatively new party with no previous experience in government. Being in opposition affords PEI Greens the opportunity to closely observe government, and to advocate for the inclusion of Green values and policies in a minority parliament, without the immediate weight of government on their shoulders. It was not, by my measure, a loss at all.

I feel the same way about the likely position of the federal Greens after this election: it seems clear that there will be more Greens elected, across the country, than ever before. And also unlikely that any party is going to form a majority. This will place the Greens in an excellent position to guide and influence the upcoming parliament in ways heretofore not possible. As the recent sitting of the PEI Legislature showed, minority parliaments can work, and work well, injecting a spirit and practice of collegiality that has largely been absent until now.

The Charlottetown Candidates

There are five candidates vying for the seat here in Charlottetown: Joe Byrne for the NDP, Sean Casey for the Liberals, Robert Campbell for the Conservatives, Fred Macleod for the Christian Heritage Party, and Darcie Lanthier for the Greens.

I can immediately exclude three of those from consideration: Macleod’s party is essentially an anti-choice one, concerned primarily with eliminating access to abortion; Campbell’s party’s policies run contrary to almost every one of my values, and Campbell himself is rather antediluvian; Casey is personable, and somewhat more rooted in this century, but has proved neither a particularly effective constituency politician nor a national legislator of particular import (also, they bought a pipeline).

This leaves me with Byrne and Lanthier.

I have a soft spot for Joe Byrne: he is a smart, compassionate person, deeply invested in the NDP and its values. Like Joe, and like the NDP, I am, in my heart of hearts, anti-capitalist and pro-union. My paternal grandparents’ working lives were transformed by unions, and I am a proud former member of the Communications Workers of America myself, and saw directly the benefits working in a union shop can bring. I’ve voted NDP many times before.

But I’m left, in 2019, with the sense that the NDP prescription is out of step with the challenges ahead of us.

At Tuesday’s candidates debate, much of what Joe had to say led back to the notion that, in his view, the only path to real change is a transformation of our economic system. “We do this all the time,” Joe said on Tuesday during a discussion about the Confederation Bridge, “we’ve chosen, over a long period of time, to focus and concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and put less and less into the hands of our communities.”

I don’t disagree with that. But I’ve come to see concentration of wealth not as the cause of what ails us, but as a symptom of it. The NDP’s economic platform could, for most intents and purposes, have been the party’s economic platform in 1979, 1989 and 1999; I think 2019 calls for a broader, ecological view that looks more deeply at the interconnections of work, the economy, the climate, and social justice.

Which leads me to Darcie and the Greens.

Darcie

What sold me on Darcie that July evening was, to begin, very simple: she was out on her bicycle, riding around Charlottetown, as she has been doing for years.

This is the summer that I rediscovered cycling myself, and began to shift more and more of my everyday travel around town to travel by bicycle, and to see cycling as both a practical carbon-mitigation activity, and as a lens through which many other issues can be viewed. I want an MP who’s a cyclist because I want an MP who has a demonstrated commitment to, and understanding of, the kinds of behaviour and habit changes we’re all going to need to adopt, quickly, in the years to come.

Darcie is not only a cyclist, though: she is a trained renewable energy practitioner, an entrepreneur, and a community organizer. She is a feminist, she is an effective communicator, she is a perpetual volunteer. She lives and breathes and can explain the Green Party platform, and has the practical life experience to know how to carry it out.

And she is a woman. Charlottetown, nor the Queen’s district that preceded it, has never been represented in Parliament by a woman. It’s time that changed.

On a more personal level, Darcie has always treated my son Oliver like a human being, with important contributions to make. This may seem simple, but there are many who do not do this.

Darcie has welcomed Oliver into the Green Party, has listened to him talk about what matters to him. She introduced him to Elizabeth May. She’s had many conversations with him over the past year; she looks him in the eye, and takes him seriously. She gathered Greens together to celebrate his birthday last week, despite a busy campaign schedule. These are not political acts, they are acts of a human being with an open heart and an open mind.

And so…

I voted Green, for Darcie.

Darcie has a solid path to electoral victory: she’s been campaigning since the spring, knocking on thousands and thousands of doors. She has a solid campaign team, led by a seasoned campaign manager. She’s running in a district strongly represented, after April’s provincial election, by Green MLAs.

If you’re in Charlottetown, and are in the midst of making your own choice, I encourage you to visit Darcie’s website, and to call or email the campaign with any questions or concerns.

And I ask you to consider voting Green yourself.