Uninhabited Spaces

*After 30 years of being on top, it looks as though Toronto's CN Tower will lose its status as the world's tallest freestanding structure sometime later this year, assuming the Burj Dubai stays on target to reach an astonishing height of 2625 ft. *A Democratic Senator is planning to introduce a motion to censure President Bush for, among many things, the greatest assault on the U.S. Constitution in its history. The effects of a censure would largely be symbolic as it is merely a public reprimand. Besides, it's clear that Bush's political savings account has been in serious overdraft for at least a year or so. *Tammy Faye Messner passed away July 20, after a long and hard battle with cancer. She had weathered the sex and financial scandals of her former husband, televangelist James (Jim) Bakker, and she has always struck me as a great American sad clown, what with her penchant for excessive facial makeup. Still, she deserves a great deal of credit for being a voice of t...

The amount of construction on the Queen's campus these days is absolutely astounding! The place is a complete mess, and even walking across the main campus is a trial in itself. Our main artery, University Avenue, has been completely dug up , as part of a $7-million revitalization; the University's main administrative building is about to get a $12.2-million renovation; work is underway for a $3-million facelift to one of our residences; blasting is underway on our northern end and our arena is being torn down for first phase of our new $230-million student centre ; and the work starts in a week or so on a new $30-million athletic field and parking complex on our western fringe.

"We are not a theocracy and our rights are not and should not be determined by religious traditions. We live under a constitution, not Leviticus. We obey a rule of law, not your pastor or priest. Whoever your god is, whatever book you think communicates this god's laws, and however you interpret them is irrelevant to a debate about the distribution of rights and privileges. We are a secular nation. Rights are too important to be left to the irrational moral sentiments or visceral reactions of others, and the law is not about enforcing the morality of the majority. We need reasons why we grant rights to some and not to others. Reasons are what hold our society together and afford all of us an equal voice. Instead of telling a group of people that they can't have family rights and must remain social outcasts because too many of us are bigoted, perhaps we should fight against bigotry. Let's argue for moral progress rather than acquiese to bigotry and hatred. Revulsion, pe...

Food and wine enthusiasts are flocking in droves to beautiful Prince Edward County. What is quickly becoming the region's worst-kept secrets are the wineries and restaurants, cafes, and bakeries on this peninsula jutting out into Lake Ontario a mere hour west of Kingston. Nestled mostly in the town of Picton and the nearby village of Bloomfield, is the province's latest designated viticultural appellation, and home to a dozen or so worthy vineyards. On Sunday I had the pleasure of taking in some of the region's most well-known treats, with my partner Mark and two lovely friends, including three hotdogs at Buddha Dog , a latte at the Bean Counter Cafe , some book-browsing at Olivia & Company Fine Used Books , an ice-cream cone at Slickers , and tasting some cheese at the Black River Cheese Company , and finally some cider at the County Cider Company . With all the publicity the region is getting in the Toronto media one wonders how long before the County's charms are...

How difficult it is not to slip into bouts of cynicism, as we watch the candidates on both sides of the non-existent divide get ready to trample across New Hampshire. There was Clinton-squared in Idaho on a flatbed truck, miming a perfect marriage, Giuliani taking heat from the largest firefighters' union over inaccurate claims made by his team, and McCain re-arranging the deck chairs on his doomed vessel of a campaign. There was President Bush commuting Cheney's right-hand man, "Scooter" Libby, and the press blinked their eyes repeatedly, rolled over and played dead. Surely somewhere, a relaxed Rumsfield is polishing his notes for a lecture circuit that will have him laughing all the way to the bank.

Barry Zwicker's Towers of Deception (2006) should be required reading for anyone interested in the failure of the mass media organizations to uphold their fourth estate role as the gatekeepers of truth and meaning. Centred on the events at the World Trade Center and The Pentagon that fateful September morning, Zwicker--a Canadian journalist-- methodically presents a haunting and worrisome collection of omissions, disinformation, and on-the-record evidence that cumulatively serve to irrefutably contradict the official story of "the day the world changed". Zwicker also demonstrates the profound complicity in the mainstream media outlets in perpetuating demonstrable falsities and fallacies. The entire book heightens the tragedy of the events, and it cannot be simply brushed aside as the ranting of a troubled mind in a basement apartment. Indeed, Towers is remarkably well-researched, and painstakingly presented to do what the supposedly "final word" 9/11 Commissi...

Fans of "Buffy" may well want to check out season 1 of "Hex", a British take on the battle between witches and a fallen angel now available on DVD. While not as consistently clever as "Buffy" there are some excellent turns of phrases and a scene-stealing lesbian character named Thelma. Less-evolved North American viewers will be shocked and intrigued by scenes of partial nudity, and the depictions of various forms of sexuality, and mental illness. The show only made it to the end of two seasons, so it's a breeze to watch and digest.

For all those who dearly miss episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits", I implore you to run to your favourite rental store and get yourself the SCI-FI channel miniseries, "The Lost Room". Starring Pater Krause ("Six Feet Under"), this captivating story centres on a motel key that opens any door in the world (provided it has a key-lock). Any door opened with the key always leads to room #10, a room that exists outside of time and space. Of note, there were roughly 100 or so objects that were once within the room, and most have been taken out by previous key-holders. Outside the room, the Objects take on supernatural powers in the real world. A tragic set of events catapult our reluctant hero into the middle of a battle between one cabal called the Order of the Reunification (aka 'The Order')-- who want to reunite all the Objects and thus directly talk to God-- and another cabal called the Legion--who want to find the objects...

We have just returned from a lovely romantic getaway to Montreal. We had an amazing meal on Tuesday night. Not only was the meal very fine but heightened greatly by our wonderful server and the singular ambience of our surroundings. Our genial host informed us that the building we were in (pictured above) was built in 1725, which makes it the third oldest building in Montreal. Wow! While this old-stone is now one of our favourite places, we stayed in a most modern environment at the opposite end of the aesthetic scale, the ultra-hip W Montreal . From our personal and warm welcome from the staff to the cool, large room, we knew we had made a good decision. After settling in our room we embarked on a whirlwind, 4-hour walk of Montreal. We started by heading over to "Le Village" (the gay village), where we enjoyed some great shops and the dozens of rainbow flags draped on just about every business. We then hopped on the Metro (subway) and up to Le Plateau district, taking in the...

Queen's has just announced that it has picked the same firm that is currently designing the World Trade Centre Memorial Museum Pavilion to restore a former brewery & distillery (circa 1839) into a new Queen's "arts campus". The 3-acre, waterfront campus will house academic spaces for the departments of Drama, Film Studies, and the School of Music. In addition, the site will have a new performing arts complex that would contain such elements as a 500-seat concert hall, a 200-seat theatre, and other academic and performance space. This project is being funded by a gift from a very generous Queen's alumnus, and it is intended to create an artistic space not only for the University but also for the city at large. Public access to the waterfront location will be maintained and arts and cultural groups currently using the Tett Centre will continue to do so.

Last weekend I participated in my first ever Pride March! I had watched the Kingston Pride festivities from the sidelines for many years, but this year I got up the courage to join in, and I was blessed to have my partner, Mark, and my sister, Angela, along with me in support. I must admit it was an emotional experience. I was not prepared for how it hit me to the core, and what such an act truly means politically, emotionally, and spiritually. I was also so pleased that we were joined by the Sydenham Street United Church and our local NDP chapter. Other groups joining in included the Queen's student government, and CRFC radio. To his credit, Kingston mayor Harvey Rosen kicked off the event. On the ironic side of things, and unknown to most of us, the Shriners had also booked their massive parade for the very same day. So there were hundreds of older folks lined up and down our main street who ended up getting a rather colourful opening act!!

Tucked away in a bland, multi-storey building on the eastern fringe of the Queen's campus is a renegade troupe of truly out-of-the-box thinkers who are busy creating the future. Strung out on enabling something called attentive user interface , the folks at Human Media Lab are Canada's answer to MIT and Stanford. As their web site states, their mandate is to "develop disruptive technologies and new ways of working with computers that are viable 10 to 20 years from now." They are currently working on the design of organic user interfaces, an exciting new paradigm that allows computers to have any shape or form. Some amazing examples of their research can be found on their videos page, but the one getting the most attention from the media (including Wired and Businessweek ) is their device for advertisers to track the effectiveness of their messages by measuring how many people are looking at their billboards and screens. This invention, called eyebox2 , was unveiled...

I had the privilege and honour this past Friday to speak at the Law convocation, where I welcomed the graduands into the Queen's University Alumni Association. My speech was probably no more than three minutes long, but I had the pleasure of presenting the first alumni pin of the ceremony to our honorary graduate, George Thomson. Queen's delights in its traditions, and our convocation ceremony has not changed much over the past 165 years. It was an extra pleasure as this ceremony took place in Grant Hall, which was built in 1905. It has a most dignified and elegant setting, and despite the oppressive humidity and heat, it was a lovely occasion. A real highlight for me was that I was able to be a part of the academic procession, which afforded me the opportunity to walk alongside and chat with the Speaker of the House of Commons, Peter Milliken, Arts'68, renowned national affairs journalist Jeffrey Simpson, Arts'71, and former CRTC chair and noted political scientist...

I enjoy immensely looking at random data points about the world. As a much younger geek I would actually read the encyclopedia (I was an only child until 9). One of my favourite sources is the 2006 Pocket World in Fugures from the folks who produce The Economist . It's always a hoot to read through, because the results are often surprising, sometimes maddening, and always enlightening. For example, the country with the highest crime rate in the world is...Iceland. Now there's a surprise! Smug Canadians will be humbled to learn that Canada ranks 8th for highest crime rate, while the USA ranks 17th. Although, those same smug folks will relish the fact that the USA has the world's largest prison population, both overall and per 100,000. Our American friends can boast that the USA dominates 5 of the 6 categories for the Nobel prize, just barely edged out by France for total winners for literature. The USA also dominates the world in books and music sales. But while the USA ...

The good people who are part of Kingston Accommodation Partners (KAP) have launched a campaign to draw LGBT tourists to Kingston. They've branded Kingston as a "city of colours", making vague reference to the colours of the Pride flag. I salute their efforts and hope, with time, we can create a genuinely positive space for queer folks to visit and, perhaps, to stay.

I am struck at when and how it is that I have piercing moments of clarity. Such little ephiphanies typically happen to me rather organically. That is, they just bubble up on their own, having percolated for whatever time they needed to. Usually they occur when I am moving (in the car, while walking, sitting on a plane, etc). There's something key about moving and my thought processing, for some reason. I love to walk aimlessly about, while my hamster works furiously and creatively inside my head. Overall, I do my best thinking on my feet, which leads me to wonder why we have constructed our working selves to be seated. In fact, our entire workplace design seems rather counter-intuitive to me. But that's another discussion entirely. I recall getting up in the middle of the night during my undergrad years and wandering along the Kingston waterfront. It always helped me clear my mind and find some answers, or at least ask the right questions (often more important). Lately I...

A new StatsCan report has found that Kingston has the highest proportion of people with PhDs among the country's 27 largest urban areas. Viewed as essential to a knowledge-based economy, PhDs represent the engine of innovation. Interestingly, Kitchener-Waterloo--which trumpets itself as the country's Palo Alto--ranks 10th in this report. Clearly, Kingston needs to build on this strength and create (with its industrial and educational partners) a research and innovation park/campus that can truly incubate some thought-leaders.

I have gotten a few raised eyebrows when I have mentioned that the new "Battlestar Galactica" is among the very best shows out there. This reimagining of the campy 70s series debuted in 2003 as a miniseries, and was of such high quality that a series was inevitable. Let me state for the record that this program is shockingly good, raising the bar on how well written and acted a science fiction show can be. But don't just take my word--the New York Times , the New Yorker , and even the National Review have all given "Galactica" glowing reviews. Anchored by the excellent Edward James Olmos (yes, he from TV's Miami Vice ) and Mary McDonnell (two-time Academy Award nominee), the cast is simply outstanding. The series explores the relationship between a government and its military, and human values under the most adverse conditions, all amidst the clash between human and non-human sentient beings after our species is forced to flee from Earth after a massive att...

As we head into the frenzy of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, it would well-serve politicians and citizens on both sides of the border to read Michael Adams' Fire and Ice . Adams is the co-founder and president of polling company Environics, and his interests have evolved from subject-by-subject polling to macro-level social values polling. This book examined the U.S. and Canada along 100 social values points, and the results contradict commonly held assumptions about these two neighbours. I was in the last year of high school when the warning bells were struck over the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement (which later morphed into NAFTA), and how it would precipitate the decline of Canadian culture and values. The rhetoric spun on both sides of the debate here in Canada, from Mulroney's handlers to the Council of Canadians was particularly divisive. It appears the worry was not warranted. The differences among Canadian and American citizenry are rather striking. As Adams wri...

A new ranking just released by MoneySense ranks Kingston #6 overall for best place to live in Canada. While I am sure that the folks at KEDCO and DBIA will all clap themselves on the back, I worry that such a ranking will breed a dangerous complacency amongst the spin doctors and politicians. Kingston has some very real social justice problems, a worrisome unemployment rate, poor physical infrastructure, and an inadequate industrial tax base. I imagine this ranking reflects only those who fall around or above the reported average annual family income of $67,000, which is surely not a fair snapshot of the city's socio-economic reality. It would have been much more accurate to report the overall median Kingston household income, which the 2001 Canadian Census reveals was $58,413. That's a significant variance from the average! However, single-parent households (which the Census reports were 15% of Kingston's population in 2001) fared worse, with a median income of $29,872. S...

In her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood presents a dystopian world extrapolated from our current one. Transglobal biotech companies assume the dominant role of providing privileged humans with food and shelter in protected compounds. The disaffected are left to fend for themselves. There are rampant bioengineering projects, where humans are spliced with pigs and other animals are spliced together to create new species. In this environment, a scientist inadvertently creates a genetic pandemic that kills off the original human race (save for the novel's protagonist "Snowman") leaving only the genetically engineered "Crakers", an innocent, humanesque race without any knowledge of the prior reality. Atwood terms the novel as being "speculative fiction" rather than pure science fiction, as the possibilities are merely an extension of what she views as the logical progression of our current state of affairs. In this regard, Atwood is highly unroman...

I have been struggling over the past week with how I am supposed to appropriately react to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. As someone who works at a university, this terrible event struck me much harder than I had anticipated. It brought me back to my first year of studies, in December 1989, when a similar horror occured at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. Of course, a great deal of that emotion was fuelled by the wall-to-wall coverage on the U.S. news programs. At one point this week, every link on the top-half of CNN's web site was about the Virginia Tech shootings. I kept expecting to learn that FOX News had scooped its rivals and trademarked "The Worst Shooting in U.S. History". I was struck how, buried about a quarter down CNN's home page, I found a link that casually mentioned that 160 people had been killed in Baghdad that day. This terrible information, for whatever reason, did not warrant the honour of being placed in the special "Breaking News" s...

25 years ago this week the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted, thus establishing a more comprehensive codification of numerous rights of Canadian citizens than the previous Bill of Rights (1960). Such rights include fundamental freedoms, democratic rights, legal rights, equality rights, and mobility rights, among others. Legal scholars (and politicians) on the right have argued that the Charter has enabled the proliferation of so-called activist judges. These are judges who use their dreaded leftist/liberal bias to make judgements in favour of special interest groups. A "special interest" group is a derogatory term referring to minority and marginalized groups (women, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, etc). You'll note that the lobby groups representing Big Business (Tobacco, Automobiles, Weapons, Security, etc)are never referred to as special interest groups by those on the right. Only those pesky citizens demanding the same legal pro...

I've been re-reading Alvin Toffler's 1970 juggernaut , Future Shock. At its heart, the book's premise is that there are limits to the amount of change that humans can absorb without being overwhelmed, both physiologically and psychologically. The state such an over-stimulation creates what is Toffler coined "future shock". The future, Toffler wrote, will present the super-industrial citizen with a paralyzing dilemma: overchoice. Toffler strikingly argued that we will like to belong to subcults as a way of handling the enormous volume of information, choice, and stimuli. Typically, these subcults will reflect our lifestyle (or rather the lifestyle we desire to reflect) and we will consume the products and the values of that preferred lifestyle. In an era of fractured society (values, families, groups, etc), how interesting that we are are flocking to blogs, Facebook, and MySpace to create our virtual subcults. We are enormously adaptive creatures and the imaginatio...

In her provocative paper "A Pornography of Birth: Crossing the Moral Boundaries", New Zealand geography professor Robyn Longhurst asserts that "The moral boundary between what is considered ‘normal’ and what is considered ‘perverse’ is constantly struggled over and is temporally and spatially specific. [U]nderstanding sexualized acts and spaces is multifaceted and contradictory since (hetero)sexuality does not stand alone but is entangled with gender, race, ethnicity, social class, age and so on." I am intrigued by philosophy and geography intersecting in a converation about the role of space in our epistemologies, and the impact that very understanding may have on our moral claims and subsequent (un)ethical behaviour. We often talk about "Other" as a conceptual term, but it appears that we really see "Other" as a physicality as well. I think this helps explain how it is that our control of our behaviour in our day-to-day spaces becomes affected...