Month: May 2005

What I Want The Web To Do For Me

I was listening to an US AM radio station last night when I heard an ad for eHarmony, a dating/matching service, which got me thinking how it is too bad that it is focused on the big but (if at all effective) one-time event. We need similar tools like that on the web which actually serve on-going purposes like some of these:

  • e-Literate.com: a readers service where you put in the last 12 books you like as well some other information to get recommended reading for the next 12. No sales of books are tied to the site as flogging is not the point.
  • Ska-mazon.com: you tell the web site which ska records you have and it will tell you the ones you should look out for and where you can get them. Flogging is OK as it is pretty hard to find good ska these days.
  • e-Quaintance.com: once you have pals from undergrad who move away but you keep in touch with and once you have a family, everyone still needs a circle of some what tenuous acquaintences that you can get together with but have no need to really get to know. You can have a decent pint with them. You can talk a bit of sports with them but when they head out you can’t be sure if you have their name quite right. The service weeds out those who would be a particular irritant to a decent crowd – including you.
  • LiFix.com: It is as likely as not that the thing you would be best suited for is something you have really never come into contact with. I, for example, am convinced but for fate I would have made an excellent Bush Tucker Man or second rhythm guitarist for a major rock act….major. So with this website, people load in their lives facts offer to give them up in exchange for a better fate and see if through a succession of elaborate exchanges of place and identity, the real life you deserve – like mine of either the outback or spandex – might be lived either on a temporary but also perhaps permanent basis given filing of certain consents and health information.

Is this too much to ask of the internet which promised so much but gave us only blogs? There must be more web apps you would like to see.

Vatican Radiowave Crime!

You just never see a story like this every day – a cardinal convicted in a sordid shortwave radio plot:

A court in Rome on Monday convicted a Vatican cardinal and the head of the city-state’s radio station for electromagnetic pollution. They were given 10-day suspended sentences, which they have appealed. Cardinal Roberto Tucci, former head of Vatican Radio’s management committee, and the Rev. Pasquale Borgomeo, the station’s director general, were charged with “dangerous launching of objects,” referring to the station’s electromagnetic waves. Residents of the Rome suburb Cessano near the station complained they could hear Vatican Radio broadcasts through their lamps because of electromagnetic disturbances.

That is just beautiful. Sadly, it is not just funny nutty tale as the high intensity transmitters, still using shortwaves to broadcast to the globe, are a possible source of illness in the neighbouring residential area. Within the actual city, there are around 100 Kw worth of transmitters dated to the early 1950s. That is a lot less than the 1700 Kw worth of tranmitters Canada has at Sackville, NB (seen left 60 years ago when style was king) but they are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of acres of salt marsh as opposed to Italian suburbs. This 2001 defence of Vatican Radio‘s transmitters indicates that the allegation was leukemia rates were higher and is contrary to this statement in support of the correlation between RF and leukemia. It also indicated that the district of Rome in question is not cheek to jowl with Vatican City’s walls but one called Santa Maria in Galeria where the Vatican’s transmitters pump out 2410 Kw under an agreement reached decades ago. The VR PR looks better in Italian but what doesn’t.

The defence I came across in favour of the Vatican contains one most charming argument in terms of its sensitivity to public health issues:

All the more “correct” were the observations made by the director of Vatican Radio, Father Borgomeo, who recalled that in 1951 the area where the transmitters were being installed was virtually uninhabited. The development of the area, and the construction of homes there, began only after the transmission facility was in place. So one might ask: If there is a direct link between the electromagnetic transmissions and cancer statistics, why aren’t the local builders and administrators, who allowed the residential developments in the area, called to account? For that matter, why are only radio broadcasters being investigated, and not television stations? After all, the transmission facilities of the state-owned RAI television network are located right in the heart of Rome, on Via Teulada.

Amazing and takes no responsibility for the fact that 2000 Kw of the 2410 Kw were built since 1976. No wonder they can hear the radio through light bulbs. I bet if they checked, there also would be a low instance of perms being ordered at hair dress salons as well.


“I’m on the Vatican, woe-oh, Radi-o…”

Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy

Went to a movie. That is four times in 18 months which is something of a revival as I did not sit in the seat thinking how odd to be at the movies or how odd that I am staring at flickering images on a wall having a group emotional experience with strangers. I quite enjoyed it, the group-tee-hee.

When I was a kid, in that span from say age 12 to 27 long ago, CBC Halifax played a serialized for radio version of the book the Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy but it was in such short chunks that I gave it half attention and never picked up the book in the same way I never went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday midnights, cold toast in my pockets. Like that movie, I knew about the Guide but was not immersed in it. See, I had a brother who was always dragging sci-fi books home and so, like the Boston Bruins and the other brother, that was never my territory. Sci-fi movies and TV, however, were as I grew up in the era of not only Close Encounters of a Third Kind (grade 8 or so) or Star Wars (I recall seeing The Empire Strikes Back in grade 11 with pals on a summer night) but also Space 1999 on 1970s CBC Halifax TV Saturday night before the hockey but after CTV had the Ali fight, Dr. Who on Maine PBS TV a few years later at Saturday evening suppertime and, of course, the never ending repeats of Captain Kirk and the original Star Trek. What made all these shows differ from every thing from the Star Trek: Next Generation and afterwards was they were pre-ironic. The golden era of slightly prickly pricky irony can be quite specifically dated. It started quietly with the David Letterman’s morning talkshow of the early 80’s and ended with 9/11 – when it was enough to point out that someone didn’t get something, though only a facet, was enough to curse them as not “getting it”, that undefined yet elemental thing called “it”. During that era of irony, crapping on something as light judgment was considered funny and somehow insightful. It lasted long enough that there are actually people raised mainly in that era, unaware that pre-irony existed, who think it is a synonym for humour alone – unaware that it is the humour of the slightly bastardly. Anyway, in the pre-ironic era, people could and did believe in things (baseball, sci-fi, political parties, faith) while having trust in what they knew that was at odds with the belief. I knew my baseball team was bad and would never win the World Series or that a given politician was on the take but was otherwise useful – but it did not colour the entire relationship I had with baseball or politics because I knew there was much I did not know. Hence, the pleasure of supposition concerning the possible.

Now, we think we can know everything, know we must know everything and “believe” in politics, religion and sports teams as absolutes not as things in themselves full of fallible people and not just as sets of particular facts but as global ideals. We have to “believe” because this is the era of serious stuff when the person who raises a particular fact that makes complications for a given ideal is to question the idea and its absolute nature thereby being a heretic rather than someone just noting the reality of the relative – again, we can suffer not “getting it” without the accuser having ever to define what “it” is. In this way, irony and belief are two sides to the same coin. But in the pre-serious, pre-ironic era when we knew bad stuff happened, in the world, to each of us and we took it in stride. Ali was beaten from time to time so we could watch sci-fi and think to ourselves…maybe…just maybe that is who things will work out. The motto of the Hitchhiker’s Guide (meaning the book within the book, radio, movie) of “Don’t Panic” has a ring of “Keep On Truckin'” to it – things will be bad from time to time but life will either go on or it won’t and there is not much you can do about that – going with the flow, sucking up the bad thing that has yet to occur. It is a message of confidence.

That is why this movie and a few others going around lately seem to me to be showing a possible dent in the culture of the serious and absolute, just as 9/11 undid irony, though in no way as swiftly, tragically or cataclysmically. It is fundamentally a movie about the question of the possible turned on its head, sci-fi of the likely in which earth is not Captain Kirk’s center of the universe, but one in which we humans do not have the right answer and where others are indifferent to our fate. Neither technology or governance will protect us from that. In that way, even thought it is a fantasy it is realistic, and so something which has been quite rare in this post-ironic era. Unlike the 1990s movies about the disco era, you are inside the premise of this movie – not asked to watch it as an outsider, mildly ridiculing the past. You know that you are watching you and you know that these are not special times you live in.

So there are three types of people: those who know what the word “Dalek” means, those who believe there is something ultimately profound in the words “red state” and “blue state” and those who may sense some dissatisfaction with both contemporary absolutism and the lingering legacy of irony whatever the cause. The first group has already seen the movie and bought the t-shirt, the second will not enjoy it and will pray for those who made it to find their final repose in hell…but there is some hope for the third.