Uninhabited Spaces

A vast amount of energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man's profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man's equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. -James Baldwin The civil rights movement has been advocating for decades that the colour of a person's skin should not be the mitigating factor in judging their character or moral worth. They have argued that race or creed has no place in making distinctions between the value of one person over another; that all persons are equal and that skin colour should be seen at most as a secondary characteristic. And yet this is not the construct of the language or paradigm of the Presidential primaries. Rather, we are presented with narrow binary understandings, not only political ( Democrat/Republican) but also racial ( Black/...

MoneySense magazine has just released its 2008 ranking of the Best Places to Live in Canada , and Kingston is ranked #4 out of 154 cities! That's a great finish for the Limestone City out of a huge list of competitors. My beloved Mark was actually interviewed about moving to Kingston from Toronto by CanWest! You can read the article here . The top-5 are Ottawa, Victoria, Fredericton, Kingston, and Levis. In case you're wondering about Canada's major cities, here's how they fared: Vancouver (10), Calgary (35), Toronto (51), Montreal (82).

What an ironic pickle the Democrats are in: while it appears that Obama has rightfully earned the party's nomination it seems that Hilary would perform better in a national campaign against McCain. The so-called superdelegates have a tough decision to make on whether to uphold essential democratic principles (and thus not disenfranchise the electorate) or look to the near future and gamble on the tea leaves.

I realized that I haven't written in a while, so I thought I would make a quick update to say that we are planning a couple of fun getaways over the next two months. The first is a much-needed trip to New York City, planned as a congratulations for Mark for completing his B.Ed. program. We're renting a 2-bedroom apartment in the Upper East Side with another couple. Should be a blast. Definitely look for my report on our adventures in the Big Apple. June will find us at Cape Cod, in the super gay-friendly resort town of Provincetown . We may even take a little side trip to Martha's Vineyard, just so Mark can see the places were his all-time favourite movie, "Jaws", was filmed. Otherwise, we plan continue our tradition of fun day- trips to the wonderful little towns of Merrickville , Bloomfield , and Westport that sprinkle the region around Kingston.

CNN is reporting that in the last 3 days American Airlines has been forced to cancel nearly 2,500 flights because their planes failed to meet federal air-worthiness standards. Today alone, they cancelled 595 more flights, about 25% of their schedule. This is a substantial, nay, catastrophic failure of duty, not to mention a disruption of service on a titanic level. So I just had to visit AA's website to see what kind of soothing PR spin they had waiting. Imagine my surprise that I found only an orange link in the same font as the rest of the page. No splashy special text box, no extra section, nothing to let you know that they were taking any extra effort to make it seem like they care. At least the link is at the top of the page, but check out their language: "Aircraft inspections affect some AA travel". Some travel??! Well, I guess 25% of your flights is "some" but assuming there were only 100 people per booked flight that would mean disrupting just shy of 60...

I attended the 8th annual Graduate Studies in Education Symposium last week at the Queen's Faculty of Education. I figured since I will be starting my M.Ed. program in July, I should participate in something that will warm up my brain and get my hamster thinking and pondering like a university student again. As I sat waiting for the keynote speaker to begin I pored over the symposium booklet to sort out how I wanted my afternoon to proceed. There were 26 different sessions to choose from, which I thought was pretty impressive. After a good 15 minutes or so I finally narrowed it down to three sessions that caught my interest. Enter the keynote, Dr. Eva Krugly-Smolska (Queen's) who talked about what we need to think about as we consider education in the global community. She opened with some good questions about how we ought to consider "community" in post-modernity and the paradox that difference is not typically an accepted part of a community, given that commonality...

Early evening, April 4 shot rings out in the Memphis sky. Free at last they took your life- They never took your pride. -U2, "Pride"

It would appear to me that we are due for a considerable technological backlash. The advent of personal devices has proceeded at such an alarmingly accelerated pace that has exceeded our capacity to fully interpret their real meaning and implication. If we start, however, to turn on the billion-dollar marketing machine and come to realize that there are very real consequences for a family of five to each trot out of the house with a cellphone and iPod, then we might harvest a resistance to our programmed consumerism. I am not certain when it was exactly that we stopped being citizens and became consumers, but I would suggest it likely began in the 1950s, thanks to the post-war boom and the gentle sounds of domesticity oozing so seductively from the darnfangled new thing called "Television". Indeed, for the first time we could see what a good family was supposed to look like and--most importantly--what a good family should own. As much as the cognoscenti love to derride televi...