I made my regular pilgrimage to the great Toadstool Books and came away with these four. Between them they include most of what I’m interested in these days.

Last week at the David MacDonald seminar, I mentioned to the assembled group that I spend my life responding to bug reports:

In the discussion that followed, I talked about how I spend my daily life, in essence, responding to bug reports.

I talked about how, when you spend enough time shining light in the dark recesses of a digital system, addressing its bugs and trying to add missing features, sometimes you reach a point where you realize that the digital system’s fundamental design is one substantially unsuited to the task for which it’s being used.

One of the things that became clear from the reaction to this characterization is that the notion of a “bug report,” while second nature to the digerati, isn’t something that regular everyday people necessarily understand. That’s a shame, as I believe it’s a useful notion, one that allows many problems to be solved quickly, efficiently and powerfully without recourse to blame or getting overwhelmed by scale. Nothing everything can be characterized as a bug, but many things can, especially with regards to small-scale human systems like cities.

I had a chance to take this idea out for a ride last week when I noticed that Holland College had started to demolish buildings immediately upon receipt of a building permit, without waiting for the 21 day appeal period, which ends on September 5, to arrive.

This seemed like a bug to me in the city’s operating system: an unanticipated confluence of conditions that resulted in an unrecoverable error.

And so I suggested to the CBC that it do a story on this, Steve Bruce got assigned the story, and it was published today online and will run tonight on Compass.

I was happy with Councillor Greg Rivard’s reaction to the suggestion that this was an issue that needed to be resolved.

And how often does one get to read Rukavina is right as a subhead!

And that’s the thing about bug reports, and while they’re useful: I didn’t blame anyone, I didn’t suggest that anyone had done anything wrong, or that anyone was corrupt, or that anything more than Holland College following the rules, as laid out, had happened. I simply pointed out a logical consistency in a bylaw, with the hopes that it would be corrected.

In the summer, Air Canada runs flights to Montreal using its Rouge sub-brand, which is a euphemism for “cram as many vacationers onto the plane as possible.”

For the tall, like me, this means knees abut the seat in front.

For the run from Montreal to Boston I lucked into an exit row seat. It’s missing a right arm rest, but I have about a metre of leg room.

In all the years I’ve been flying out of Charlottetown, I’ve never seen it as busy at 6:00 a.m. as it is today. There are 3 flights departing within an hour of each other, and, from the looks of it, they’re all full.

I ignored the advice to show up 2 hours in advance as absurd (midwinter I’ve seen as few as a half dozen people in the waiting room). After all, what’s the point of living 10 minutes from the airport.

Most everyone else seems to have heeded the advice. And so there was no security line, and I went from cab to gate in 4 minutes.

Art in the Open was wonderful. Again. In a new way. As it always is.

My favourite part of it all was watching people amble—and ambling is truly the best word for it—across the fields and through the forest and around the campfires. The pace, the expressions on the face, it’s not like anything else: it’s not work, it’s not shopping, it’s not entertainment; it’s (only) art. It’s a sight to behold.

When we say “I wish this lasted longer,” I think the amble is what we’re talking about. The disengaged engaged amble that allows the art to leak in when you’re not paying attention.

I wish this lasted longer.

An impromptu father and son haircut outing at Ray’s. The renovations are complete and the place has never looked better.

For someone who has challenges with transitions, Oliver’s always done well with haircuts; I credit Ray’s for that.

From Spectrum News, in the post For people with autism, unforeseen events come as no surprise, a reference to the “magical world theory” of MIT professor Pawan Sinha:

“To a person with autism, it seems as if they live in a magical world where things are happening seemingly without cause,” Sinha says. “If everything is magical, then even the truly magical things would not be seen as too out of the ordinary.”

I’m wary of almost all autism research, not because of its veracity, but because, as a supporter of someone on the spectrum, it generally proves unhelpful to me in that role. But I like the way that Sinha’s theory lyrically expresses an approach to autism that is much full of possibility as of challenge.

In the abstract of the paper underlying the theory, Sinha presents a slightly more technical explanation:

With compromised prediction skills, an individual with autism inhabits a seemingly “magical” world wherein events occur unexpectedly and without cause. Immersion in such a capricious environment can prove overwhelming and compromise one’s ability to effectively interact with it. If validated, this hypothesis has the potential of providing unifying insights into multiple aspects of autism, with attendant benefits for improving diagnosis and therapy.

Stated this way it makes me think that “immersion in a capricious environment” is something that describes the modern condition for all of us; in this light, the diagnosis and therapy that might result may prove universally useful.

Spotted recently. I’m slow on the uptake, so it’s quite likely that these trends are all months or years old and I’ve just picked up on them.

• Campers, as a term for people hanging out all day on their laptops in cafés. Spotted in this Instagram post of Alper’s, where he writes, in part, “There is a coworking space separate from the cafe which stems hopeful that this place will not be overrun by campers.”
• Dry Snitching, as a term for admitting to your own illegal behaviour in writing or song; heard in an interview with Dan Auerbach this morning on CBC Q this morning.
• Apparently wearing Birkenstocks with socks, which was de rigeur in the 1980s, is back. At least according to my young millennial friend Ila.
• Speaking of millennials, my old friend Yvonne, a parent of three of them, tells me that what we of the previous generation know about dating and romance has been rewritten, and everything’s more fluid and less serious.

Meanwhile, according to the 2018 edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, there’s something called doga now, which is yoga that you do with your dog.

At Hon. David MacDonald’s Tuesday morning seminar this week, the final one of his summer series, the topic was “Is Reconciliation Possible? Why do we need to unsettle the settler?”

As part of his introduction to the topic, David played an excerpt from a speech by The Right Reverend Jordan Cantwell, Moderator of the United Church of Canada.

In her speech, Cantwell discusses the repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery by the Church; by way of example she tells the story of the Saskatchewan Conference of the Church, faced with an ideological fork in the road. The Conference holds lands, called the “Moats Lands,” that were donated to it, and that generate substantial revenue from natural resources. How could the Church repudiate the Discovery Doctrine while, at the same time, profit from lands that it owned as a direct result of that same Doctrine?

In the discussion that followed, I talked about how I spend my daily life, in essence, responding to bug reports.

I talked about how, when you spend enough time shining light in the dark recesses of a digital system, addressing its bugs and trying to add missing features, sometimes you reach a point where you realize that the digital system’s fundamental design is one substantially unsuited to the task for which it’s being used.

Most of the time there’s little you can do about this, other than to continue to patch the system as best you can, for there’s seldom appetite for, nor resources for, reconceiving of systems in a substantial way (and, when there is, such efforts often fail on an epic scale).

I characterized the United Church’s Moats Lands conundrum as a “bug” in the Church’s system, one that was ultimately (at least partially) patched by a decision to redirect the revenue from the lands to aboriginal hands.

The larger question, though, is whether the United Church, and everything it represents as a proxy for progressive western Christianity, is a system that can continue to be patched (with regard to Discovery Doctrine), or whether the very basis upon which the Church exists is based on a fundamentally broken set of assumptions.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I think it’s worth asking; Cantwell’s words suggests, in fact, that the Church is asking itself these questions, and in that there is hope.