And we're done

So I will no longer be posting here. If you have been following my blog then you will know that I went to a rather large and extended effort to change my name back to my legal birth name (follow my name change label). I'm not completely finished in the process, kind of ran out of steam at a certain point, but I did start a new blog using my 'new' (old) name. That's where I will be posting from now on.

So, if you have bookmarked this blog, change it now to said ElizabethAnn. Or look for it on the right side of this blog and follow the link…

See you there!

Happy finds

I just got email from my brother in Ontario pointing me to a website in California where someone has a copy of Folk Songs for Little Sailors available for download. What a treat!

This album was released in 1966 by Riverside Records, it is a compilation of sea chanteys apparently intended for children, but in fact for anyone who likes that kind of music. Back in the '60s my parents gave this record album to my sister for Christmas, but it quickly became a family classic.

Somehow it was lost. I remember borrowing the album from my parents as an adult, but I was pretty sure I had returned it. However it hasn't been seen since and I don't have it. What can I say.

Anyway. This morning I downloaded it from the website, firing off a Thank you note to the website owner (and she wrote back "May you and your family enjoy a rousing chorus of Twinkie-doodle-um, twinkie-doodle-um, sang the bold fisherman."). Now I am listening to it as I write this. It is scratchy, as one would expect from forty-year-old well-played vinyl, but still a treat.

Sail Away, Sail Away – Bob Gibson
The Walloping Windowblind – Oscar Brand
The Bold Fisherman – Oscar Brand
High Barbary – Billy Faier
The Sailor's Hornpipe – Billy Faier
The Fishes Song – Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
The Golden Vanitee – Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
Two Little Boats I Spy – Louise DeCormier
The Mermaid – John Runge
The Flying Dutchman – Dean Gitter
Belfast Hornpipe – Margaret Barry
Sir Patrick Spens – Ed McCurdy
Bunch Of Roses – Oscar Brand
Midnight On The Ocean – Oscar Brand
Sailing Along And Singing – The Renaissance Chorus

"Sir Patrick Spens" was one of Dad's favourites, "The Flying Dutchman" one of mine. But they're all good.

Another delightful find:

Last year I went to the spring One Of A Kind craft show in Toronto and bought--among other things--a wooden fountain pen. Again, I managed to lose it. Don't know how or where, but it is gone. And of course I didn't remember who I bought it from and there were no clues on the OneOfAKind website. I just remembered that the fellow who made it was francophone, I thought maybe from Montreal. I did a search on that information, but nothing that tweaked my memory showed up.

So yesterday, I was browsing old blog entries, and it turns out I had one about that visit to the OneOfAKind. Not only that, but I had (very thoughtfully I think ;-) put weblinks to the sites of the artisans that I purchased items from. And there he was, Richard Boucher at Stylos Boucher. I emailed him and he told me which model he thought I had purchased. He said it was out of stock, but if I told him what kind of wood I wanted he'd make another one for me. It'll cost me more than I paid for the first one but I suppose that's what you get for losing something valuable.

I chose spalted maple, which is maple wood with black lines running along the grain from some kind of fungus. Quite pretty I think. I am looking forward to its arrival.

A good yarn

There's a great little blog post over at The Yarn Harlot today (actually, yesterday).
It's not what you think.

Oh, and Josh?
You need a new hovercraft.
Eels indeed...

OK off you go, I'm done here.

Bialys, burritos and screwed up thinking

Browsing some blogs today, I came across something new to me, the bialy, and an interesting article in Wired magazine, "Accept defeat: the neuroscience of screwing up", thanks to Ageless Marketing.

I've been thinking about wanting to make something new in the way of bread, the bialy sounds like an interesting challenge. In reading some of the stuff on the web about bialys, there seems to be a lot of attention being paid to authenticity, the real bialy. Myself, having never tasted a real bialy, don't presume to reconstruct one authentically. But it sounds like an interesting idea, a small flatbread with a fried onion centre.

When I was young and married, I attempted to reconstruct the burrito. I'd never heard of a burrito, but my husband grew up in southern California and had fond memories of trading his peanut-butter-and-jelly lunch sandwiches for his Latino classmates' lunch burritos. He loved burritos. He tried to explain to me what a burrito was, and I tried to reconstruct it from his description. At the time we lived in a log cabin back of beyond with extremely limited financial resources, no electricity and no running water.

I'd had Indian food, I knew what a chapati was, and his description of the flour tortilla sounded like a chapati to me and I thought I could reconstruct that, more or less. Refried beans, how hard can that be? But salsa? I'd never heard of salsa, and his description of a kind of spicy tomato sauce translated in my head to ketchup and tabasco. Thus was born my recipe for burritos: an unyeasted flatbread rolled thin with a rolling pin and baked at high heat on a cast aluminum griddle, a dollop of kidney beans cooked, mashed and then fried in bacon fat to a soft but not runny consistency, topped with grated cheddar, fine chopped onion, chopped tomato, lettuce, and lots of ketchup and tabasco to taste.

If my husband found them odd he never said anything, we happily ate lots of them and so did our kids. I have photos of my first as a toddler with refried beans and ketchup smeared all over his face and hands (we withheld the tabasco on his burrito).

To this day I prefer ketchup and tabasco over salsa, and apparently so do my kids. When my daughter-in-law serves burritos, she always sets the ketchup bottle by my son's plate. So I am not particularly hung up on authenticity, anyone who can substitute ketchup for salsa is clearly not a purist. If I make a bialy, it'll be of the ketchup-and-tabasco variety.

The other article, about how science is really done, just makes complete sense to me, having spent a period of my life studying biology and working in a biology lab. Also how naivete and skepticism actually work to solve scientific puzzles. In the article, there was one particularly intriguing scenario about two labs faced with the same puzzle, and how they approached the problem.

One lab was full of experts on the particular area of science being studied (in this case the bacterium E. coli), and the other was full of people with a variety of backgrounds, very few or none of them experts in E. coli. The problem was that the filters being used in the experiment were getting clogged with protein matter, thus preventing the experiment from proceeding properly. The E. coli experts spent a lot of time methodically trying various fixes over a period of several weeks until they eventually got the filters working properly. The other more diverse lab discussed the problem amongst themselves and by the end of a single meeting came up with an effective solution. The first part of the meeting was seemingly unproductive, a lot of fumbling around trying to pinpoint the problem to everyone's satisfaction. But once that was done it took all of 10 minutes to come up with the working solution.

Experts in a narrow field (such as everything there is to know about E. coli) know a lot about a little, and develop a highly specialized language to discuss it among themselves. A language few others could understand. Put a bunch of experts in a variety of fields in a meeting together and they are force to speak English in order to be understood by each other. They must resort to metaphor and analogy to explain their points. And if some of those present are not experts at all, then everything must be explained in simple terms. This leaves the whole group wide open to lateral thinking, thinking outside of the box. Assumptions based on a narrow field of expertise just get trampled by too many non-experts. The diverse perspectives brought to bear on a single problem and the creative language used to describe the problem opened up possibilities that were simply unavailable to a group of people sharing a single perspective and a single, very precise language to describe the problem.

We believe in experts, people who are trained to understand a single subject absolutely thoroughly, but therein is our creative downfall. Narrow fields of expertise impose blinkers, blinkers shield out the unexpected and improbable. Skeptics and intellectual outsiders are often wrong and misguided, but they are also responsible for astounding breakthroughs, because they attack or bypass the blinkers.

Some have commented on how the best science is practiced by young scientists, that as scientists age they lose their edge. I don't think it is so much a matter of losing edge as it is of becoming mired in expert assumptions. Those who are new to the field retain naivete that lets them think and act beyond scientific assumptions, and those who are new to a field are most often young.

Bloggers' lunch

On Wednesday I went for lunch with a fellow blogger, Wisewebwoman. We've been reading and commenting on each other's blogs for a while, this week we are in the same place at the same time so it seemed like a great opportunity to meet.

I had a fabulous time! We had a long leisurely lunch and chatted about all things bloggy, traded a few life stories and opinions, and laughed a lot. I guess when you've been reading what someone else is writing over a period of time you have an immediate point to start from, I don't think there was an awkward moment in the entire time.

And I could have listened to WWW all day long, she has a wonderful Irish lilt to her voice, and twinkling eyes to match.

Dealing with despair and cynicism

Sorry about the title, hardly appropriate for such a lovely sunny day, but oh well. I am including some nice flower pictures to counteract the heavy topic...

Having access to high speed internet for a short while allows me to feed my addiction to websurfing and blog-browsing. My Firefox Bookmarks list of favourite blogs is quite long, and with my dial-up access I have had to create a short list of blogs I cannot live without. Thus leaving out quite a few that I wish I could keep up with. So I have been browsing the long list.

One blog on my long list is The Great Change by Albert Bates, who I met a few years ago while spending the summer at The Farm in Tennessee. I don't always agree with his opinions but he is very knowledgeable, an interesting writer, and one shouldn't always read only what one agrees with, should one? His latest post among other things is about his own personal existential crisis, one I can relate to since it frequently crosses my mind too.

Albert starts out describing a grim prognosis for the future of the Earth, the overwhelming evidence and scientific opinion that we face massive extinction of life in very short order, including not only humans and other large critters but also fungi and microbes (life on Earth might benefit from the extinction of humans, but definitely not from the extinction of fungi and microbes). Then he posts an endearing photo of his three-year old grandchild, someone who might very well grow up to observe and participate in said extinction.

My own opinion is sadly similar, where I think I part company with Albert is that I think it is irresponsible to hammer on that opinion incessantly. I do think we are on the brink of the ultimate disaster, if not sliding inevitably into it. I have grandchildren I fear for. But I cannot see the future, I do not know for sure that the End Times are upon us, it just feels like it. So knowing and feeling that, what is one to do?

Albert provides an answer to that question for himself and I think it is a good one. He starts with a quote that I really like, a peyote prayer: "I am going to follow God, I am going to follow God, I am not turning back." I'll let you go over to his blog to read the rest...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Not too long ago I heard an interview with Dr. James Lovelock, by Anne-Marie Tremonte, the host of CBC's The Current. He is the originator of The Gaia Hypothesis (that the Earth functions like a living organism, sometimes misunderstood as the Earth is a living organism), and just celebrated his 90th birthday in July. He published a book a few years ago called The Revenge of Gaia that very much perturbed many environmental and climate change activists because he came out solidly in favour of greatly expanding our reliance on nuclear energy as quickly as possible. He has another book out now, The Vanishing Face of Gaia.

At any rate, I found that interview profoundly uplifting, although a neighbour who also listened to it found it profoundly depressing. Quite the fellow that he can evoke both feelings at the same time!

What my neighbour found depressing was his insistence that we are past the point of return with climate change, it's all downhill from here and very few people will survive it. He said that all efforts to avert disaster are too late and a waste of time; we would be far better off putting our efforts toward figuring out how to adapt to and survive the coming drastic changes than trying to prevent them.

But interestingly he does not take a stance of blame on this. I have grown tired of listening to doomsayers who castigate the selfishness and downright short-sighted evilness of humans for creating this situation. So I am happy that he agrees with me on that (excuse my arrogance!). He said that in fact if you want to point your finger at any one cause of drastic climate change on the Earth, far better to point at algae rather than humans.

Several billion years ago the algae very nearly did cause the permanent extinction of all life on Earth. We weren't around at the time so we are largely unaware of how close it really was, but the climate change that occurred in that era was far more awesome than what is now predicted on the basis of human efforts. We got nothing on the lowly algae!

The other thing that he said when Anne-Marie asked him if we deserved to suffer the consequences of our ignorant actions was, Oh no! We are the crowning achievement of Mother Nature! It is to be fervently hoped that we will survive, because we really are worth saving. And this is what I found to be most uplifting, that he does not consign us ignorant human beings to the deepest circle of Hell for what we have done to the Earth, but rather fervently hopes for our survival and even transcendence of the current predicament, because we are worth it.

How 'bout them apples, huh?

My own opinion on that matter is that we are like teenagers, we revel in our new-found (relatively speaking) powers, believe we are immortal, and wreak havoc as a result. A hundred years ago, who knew that we were already on the brink of climate change disaster?!? Fifty years ago? It's easy and even satisfying to point the finger of blame, but what good does it do?

Lovelock still comes out in favour of nuclear energy because he believes that it is the quickest way to switch away from carbon dioxide releasing fossil fuels. He also points to statistics that show that so far it is the safest form of energy production we currently have. He does not suggest that this is a permanent solution to our energy needs, but rather it is a stopgap solution to buy us some time to come up with a longterm solution.

I have read some recent and not-so-recent reviews of Lovelock's work and on the basis of this interview I think that what he is saying is largely misunderstood. Personally, I have huge admiration for the man and he is just about the only thing that gives me hope for the future of my grandchildren, for all the grandchildren.

Let me rephrase that. Not that Lovelock will single-handedly save the world, but rather that he points to the possibility of a positive outcome from a very bleak situation. I know that there are many people quietly and not-so-quietly working toward that end, and their efforts will be what brings that positive outcome to pass, if it is to happen at all. Those people are very much deserving of my/our admiration, maybe even more so. But I admire Lovelock for his lifetime body of work, his realistic but hopeful attitude, and his efforts to communicate that.

Not on the road but in recovery

The pictures today are completely unrelated to the text, they're from a recent shopping trip on Roncie (Roncesvalles).

Best laid plans, etc

All the test results are in and the coast is clear. With a couple of minor exceptions, nothing there to impede the way. The twinge of pain down there is most likely arthritis, so I'm going to ignore it.

Doc asked if I wanted an X-ray, I said No, his diagnosis made sense to me. He said take a couple of Tylenol every day for a few days and if the pain goes away then that pretty much confirms that it's arthritis.

Of course in the meantime I came down with a sore throat and fever, so leaving today---which had been the plan if all went well at the doc's office yesterday---is now out of the question.

I'm over the worst of whatever this is, fever is gone, throat is better, but I'm sufficiently lethargic to not want to be driving all day. With the long Victoria Day weekend coming up, I don't want to be on the road with all the other holiday travellers, so that means my departure date is now postponed until sometime next week.

I have mixed feelings about it all. Toronto is leafed out and green now, the weather is neither hot nor cold, so it really is a nice time of year to be here. But I had set my heart on being in the Harbour by mid-May and that is now not going to happen.

So, my plans are now to:

(a) get better,
(b) try to get my kayak into Lake Ontario this weekend,
(c) see the latest Star Trek movie,
(d) see the last Lost episode for the season, and
(e) try to get together with The Dog Ladies one last time.

Dog days

While I was going through my week of medical tests, we very nearly lost our dogpark. Apparently a complaint was lodged (this now turns out not to be true) and one of the Catholic School Board maintenance folks told us that we would have to get a permit to take our dogs onto school property, and the permit was going to cost BIG BUCKS. It was a rather stunning turn of events. With all the stress of the medical tests I was in no mood for it and it instantly depressed me.

I thought:

(a) there's no way we can fight this, or at least not in the near term, and
(b) this dogpark has meant more than simply a place to walk the dog, it was the basis for my flimsy but growing social life in Toronto and now it's gone.

Without it I just felt like, what's the point, well, of anything, really.

However, with the Clean Train Coalition thing going on, this neighbourhood is very politicized right now, it was just a hop skip and a jump to take on the School Board over this issue. The Brockton Dogs Yahoo group had already been formed so it was kicked into high gear to take on the issue. Within a day alliances were formed with other dog owners' groups, several people were calling the Board over the issue, and news was being debated and discussed online as to what our best strategy was. The whole thing was a tempest in a teapot, within a couple of days the issue got resolved and the dogpark remains, it turns out that the "complaint" was actually a somewhat misrepresented report from a Board employee.

So kind of not surprising that I fell victim to a sore throat, as this past week has been an emotional roller coaster.

Preparations continue in spite of setbacks...

Seeing as how I have no energy for packing or cleaning or whatever, I instead mapped my truck. Crawled around inside the cab and the truckbed with a measuring tape and wrote down all the packing space measurements. Then I measured all the things I wanted to pack and tried to map them to the truck space measurements. I think I'm going to squeak by. And there's still the kayak hatches as a last resort.

Come fly with him

On another note, I recommend Black Flies and Bush Planes to you (see the blog list on the right). This is the new blog of my son Josh, who is spending this summer in northern Ontario becoming a bush pilot. He's an excellent writer (comes by it honestly I think ;-) and it's an interesting topic.

Something I've found fascinating about blog-reading over the past year or so is all the sub-communities of bloggers. There are elders, birdwatchers, taxi drivers, political commentators, mommies, knitters, quilters, you name it, they have a blogging community. When you chance upon one blog you get to sample a bunch of the same ilk by following bloglist links. So Josh is the tip of the airpilot iceberg, check out his bloglist for an international sampling of airpilots who blog.

Living green and loud

Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, has a great post today about living green and loud, a kind of public green lifestyle that gets people around you thinking about changes they could make too. Like carrying a mason jar he pulled out of the garbage to the coffee shop for fill-ups, to avoid buying more stuff (a travel mug) or producing more garbage (paper or plastic cup), and politely explaining why to anyone who asks.

Two birds with one stone, you reduce your own carbon footprint, and you encourage others to do the same.

The Comments section has lots of good ideas too.

May I draw your attention to...

I would like to bring your attention to my list of "Blogs I read" on the right. I've recently added one, A Life Worth Sustaining. This is a new blog, started by a friend of mine in Tennessee, Geoffrey. He's a good writer and he has very interesting things to say. And he writes (and posts) poetry! Now that I admire, I couldn't write a poem to save my life.

I think all the blogs on that list are worth taking a peak at, although I haven't read many of them very recently because getting on the web for extended periods of reading is difficult these days. Right now I read Geoffrey's, Gretel's, and when I can Time Goes By.

I've made The List

I don't have a lot of time these days to read my favourite blogs but today I checked in on Ronni Bennett's Time Goes By, and I see that my blog has been added to her list of elderbloggers. Wow, I am honoured to be there!

I had a bit of a pang of regret about it though, since my blog right now is so focussed on the process of building my kayak. I can't imagine that this is particularly fascinating for most folks passing through from Time Goes By!

It certainly wasn't my intent when I started this blog back in January to be so focussed on the gory details of kayak building, but at a certain point I decided that I wanted to record the process and now feel like I am in too far to quit now. I originally thought this would take about three weeks and already I've been at it for six weeks, with the end still a ways off. My life seems to have been reduced to epoxy.

Adventures in seeing

I've been catching up on my internet reading.

Mostly I read other blogs, I think I have a "milk route" of about thirty blogs I like to keep up on. Besides the ones I list over on the right:

- Some are about knitting (e.g. - Mason-Dixon, Knitspot),
- Some are eco-rants (e.g. - Little Blog in the Big Woods, Archdruid Report) or political rants (Ran Prieur, Vanity Press - they're not so political really, that's just how I categorized them at the time),
- There's only one food-related blog I follow regularly (Pioneer Woman) but a couple of others I check occasionally,
- A couple of photo-blogs (daily dose, Shorpy),
- A whole lot of elder blogs (e.g. - Serene Ambition, A Little Red Hen),
and
- A few I haven't categorized, they're just interesting (e.g. - Mathilda's Anthropology, Rebecca's Pocket).

[this is not an exhaustive list!]

Yesterday I put my contacts on instead of my glasses. Normally I wear glasses because:

(a) I've needed glasses most of my life, and
(b) they're easier to slap on than contacts.

In my 30s and early 40s the contacts were nice, it was a revelation to see the world "unframed" and in full colour. But with the onset of later life vision changes, the contacts became more and more difficult. With glasses I could get progressive lenses that allowed me to see both close up and in the distance without difficulty. But with contacts I had to do something called "mono-vision" where one lens is adjusted for seeing close up and the other for distance vision. That worked well at first but has become progressively more problematic. And the new contact lenses are thinner and more difficult to put in.

However, for snorkelling in Belize I needed to wear the contacts because I can't wear glasses inside a snorkel mask and I don't want to invest in a prescription mask. And I was pleasantly surprised by how easily the contacts went in and how well I could see with them. So I thought I'd try to wear them more often at home.

All I can say is, snorkelling is a whole lot different from viewing the internet on a computer.

The mono-vision contact lenses rely on your brain to sort out the two different images you get from the different lenses. For distance, this works OK, but for close-up it's a bit more work. And what I am noticing is a sort of flickering effect while looking at a computer monitor, that makes reading a little harder. I can do it, but it feels like work and I am inclined not to spend too much time working at reading the screen. Which is perhaps a good thing.

It's not exactly flickering, it's hard to describe exactly, but I am guessing it is caused by my brain trying to switch rapidly back and forth between the two images it is getting. Which gives everything a kind of ephemeral, unreal feel to it. Makes "reality" seem a little less "real".

Not unlike what you see wearing those glasses they give you for viewing 3-D movies. A kind of surreal glow to things.

But I couldn't wear them for Thursday night knitting, just not good enough close up vision and by evening my eyes were starting to feel very dry and tired.

Weekend in Barrie, Bunny takes a trip

This weekend felt like the first weekend of summer. Hot. I kept looking at the trees, wondering why they had no leaves.

Had a good visit with my brother and his family in Barrie, he's lost some weight since the last time I saw him and is looking very fit. He invited me to go for a walk with him on Saturday morning, at 6.30am. He woke me up at 6.00am and we walked down to the lakeshore and along the boardwalk there for a ways, then turned around and came back, picking up some coffee for breakfast. That pretty much left me exhausted for the rest of the day! I'm going to have to work at it if I expect to be as fit as my brother, it's been a long time since I could say that.

Later in the day we walked over to a mall and did a bit of shopping. I bought an outfit I can use as a bathing suit in Belize, but also can wear kayaking or jogging or just working in the garden. It's completely synthetic, made from material that dries quickly and protects against UV. I got three pieces, a sports bra, a pair of shorts and a shirt. They are snug-fitting, so they won't balloon up in the water. It's not that I need a new bathing suit, but I did want to have something that I could wear while snorkelling that would protect against the sun. And being a certain age, I'm happy not to expose all my skin while swimming; this outfit provides coverage and looks good. It was expensive though, way more than I would ever pay for a bathing suit. But since it can be used for other things as well, I felt justified in paying for it. I had hoped to do all my Belize shopping errands so I wouldn't have to go shopping in Toronto, but I didn't really succeed. I still have a few more things to pick up so I will have to go shopping tomorrow or Thursday.

I checked my email when I got home today, there was one from a friend in Seattle. I had said I would be out west this summer and wondered if I could stop by to visit, he replied that was fine and he'd make space in his fridge for me. I kind of did a double take on that: in his fridge? What exactly did he have in mind? Then I realized that the last few times I have visited him I have had a cooler full of food in my truck that I would ask to put in his fridge while I was there. He knows me better than I do!

Another bit of news, tonight is Bunny's last night with me. When I arrived home, Gretel's Dad Karl (aka the Seafood Express) was here for a brief visit. And Bunny had kind of trashed my place. Apparently she thinks that when I am not home there is no need to use the litter box, rugs are just fine. So I asked Karl if he was up for taking Bunny back to PEI with him. He said it wouldn't be a problem.

I just think that travelling with her might not be realistic, I would have to constantly be watching her to keep her from escaping, I'm not sure she would enjoy it and I don't think I would either. Better she just have a new home. I would like to keep her but that's only going to work if I stay put, and I'm not staying put this summer. I will miss her but I think it is for the best. Tristan has already said his goodbyes to her.

So I hear that it is cool in Vancouver (and Seattle!) and that there even is the chance of snow there. I checked [daily dose] today and he had a photo of a pile of snow behind a building in downtown Toronto, so technically we still have snow too. But it's hot and today we have our first smog alert for the year. Crazy weather.

More docs and too much shopping

My Saturday afternoon was spent on Queen St. and in particular at Romni Wool and the Knit Cafe. I came home with a backpack full of yarn. Earlier in the day I had been at Michael's to pick up the last of the yarn I think I'll need for my mother's afghan, and between Michael's, Romni Wool and the Knit Cafe, I spent over $150 on yarn. The day before I placed a couple of book orders with Amazon.ca, also amounting to about $150. In two days I spent over $300 in books and yarn. Talk about shopping therapy! Gaah!

The problem is, that it is hard to stop. I had to force myself to leave the Knit Cafe because there were four more skeins of yarn I had my eye on. And yesterday I spent over an hour adding more books to my Amazon wish list (well, actually I have 5 wish lists, mea culpa). I think I need to get back to my old library way of thinking. It's better to borrow and read than order, own and maybe read.

Isaac and I watched a couple more Hot Docs films this weekend.

One was Kids and Money, a set of interviews with kids in LA USA about money, shopping, and status. Very interesting look at how we/society train/influence our kids to be consumers. How buying stuff is integral to self image and fitting in at school. They have to have the right clothes, some of the kids in this film spend several hundred dollars a week just on clothes (and more on accessories, make-up, etc), some of them don't but would if they could. Some of them beg their parents to buy the stuff for them, some of them go out and get jobs to pay for it. Some of them recognize how insane this is and the stress their parents are going through to keep them satisfied, but they don't seem to be able to stop themselves. They are addicted, their self-image is at stake. Watching this I could not help but think how smug all the advertisers must feel that they have been so wildly successful in creating the consumer culture. As Barbara Ehrenreich says, we (the USA, and Canada to a lesser extent) are the designated shoppers of the world, we keep this devastating global economy going by consuming what the rest of the world produces.

The second film was called Flow: For Love of Water, about the state of water resources in the world (dire). The main message seemed to be that as water becomes scarce there are forces trying to commodify it that are making the scarcity of water both a serious social injustice and an environmental hazard. It is beautifully done, combining both a serious warning and a hopeful demonstration of what can be accomplished when ordinary people put their minds to it.

The connection between the two was that at one point in Flow an Indian (from India not North America) elder talks about what is necessary for change to happen. He says it has to start inside each person, each person has to come to grips with what is important in life, and then act on it. And what kids in the other film are being taught is that owning stuff is what is important in life, consuming resources is what is important. It will take a while for most of them to learn any different, but that is time we can ill afford.

So you can imagine how guilty I am feeling about my own little episode of shopping therapy this week. But I do love looking at that bag of yarn!

But for what it's worth we also watched a wonderful film about Cirque du Soleil preparing a show on the Beatles. No guilt-inducing moral, just lots of nostalgia value, not to mention artistic value.