Seth Godin calls for “organized bankruptcy” of the Detroit Three, leading to the creation of 500 or 1,000 new car companies: “We’d have super cheap cars and super efficient cars and super weird cars. There’d be an orgy of innovation, and from that, a whole new energy and approach would evolve.” Worth a try.
Back in September, I wrote about changing the subtitle for That Good Night. Well, we’re reverted to: Ethicists, Euthanasia and the End of Life. Euthanasia is a controversial word and I’ve been warned to be prepared to take some grief for using it from people in the medical community and proponents of assisted suicide. Bring it on.
Furby House Books in Port Hope is holding a Men’s Night on Dec. 8 and I will be there to talk about DRIVE. Might do a short reading too. I gather there will be beer and I’ve been told to expect a lively — read: outspoken — crowd. Should be fun.
Update: More from Northumberland Today here.
Jack Diamond, one of the country’s finest architects and an important ally of Toronto mayor David Miller, has a good op-ed called “Now is the time to reshape our cities” in the Globe and Mail today. He argues that we need to invest in infrastructure and says now, in the midst of an economic slowdown, is the best time to make that investment. He wants more buses and more bus lanes, but knows that sprawl does not support public transit so he recommends: “higher densities should be zoned within walking distance of existing public-transit stops. To make public transit affordable, at least 25 units to the acre are necessary. Indeed, no further development should be allowed further than, say, 1,000 metres (a 15-minute walk) of a transit stop.”
Over at Wired magazine’s Autopia blog, there’s a top ten car song list. Four of them — Little Red Corvette, Radar Love, Crosstown Traffic and No Particular Place to Go — also made the 19-song car song playlist I created for DRIVE.
Good piece in the New York Times on the Chevrolet Volt: “There is a long tradition in Detroit of relying on a single new model or technology as a silver bullet to quickly solve bigger problems. Sometimes it works — the Chevrolet Corvette, the Ford Mustang and Ford Taurus, and Chrysler’s K-car lineup of compact, fuel-efficient cars in the early 1980s all gave their companies an enormous boost. But whether the Volt can live up to its billing is already a matter of debate. And some industry analysts note that General Motors has a poor track record of introducing green technology to the market.”
The bigger question is whether GM can stay alive long enough to reap the benefits of a successful Volt.
I will be reading from DRIVE at the Burn, Baby, Burn Cabaret, which is part of Alphabet City’s FUEL Festival on Sunday night.
More info:
Sunday, November 23, 2008
8:00pm
Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West
$10, free with book purchase.
Musicians and writers sing the body electric while firing up the body politic. Recharge your brain via a cabaret of ideas on what fuels everything from bodies and cars to revolutionary acts of imagination.
• singer/songwriter Bunmi Adeoye performs some fuel-inspired covers
• poet Alex Boyd reads a poem written just for this cabaret
• writer Kyle Brown reads a news report
• writer Jowita Bydlowska reads a new piece: “My Recessive Car Gene”
• Christine Duncan and the Element Choir improvise on the concept of fuel
• writer Tim Falconer reads from his new book Drive: A Road Trip Through our Complicated Affair with the Automobile (Viking Canada)
• writer J. Timothy Hunt reads from his new book The Politics of Bones, about the Royal Dutch Shell company and the assassination of Dr. Owens Wiwa in Nigeria (Random House)
• singer/songwriter Tamara Lindeman performs
• actors Liz Pounsett and Michael Ripley examine their relationship while driving, from the play To Distraction
• cellist Carina Reeves performs the Prelude from the First Suite for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach
Cabaret producers: Megan Griffith-Greene, Carina Reeves, Aeryn Twidle.
Set the PVR: TVO’s Big Ideas will feature Ron Deibert of Citizen Lab on Saturday and Sunday November 22 and 23 2008 4 pm (Repeats Saturday and Sunday at 5 am.)
“In this lecture entitled “Hacking Back: The Battle for Human Rights Online,”political science professor Ron Deibert looks at the issue of internet censorship and surveillance around the world and the tools being created (like “psiphon”) to empower global citizens to freely share and access information online. Deibert is director of The Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies.”
After getting all those sweet passes from Ronnie on the ice, I am keen to see and hear how he performs in a lecture hall.
Fellow wordinistas might find “Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy” amusing.
The More Coffee Please blog reviews DRIVE and says, “Somehow [Falconer] manages to treat all the various viewpoints with great sympathy and doesn’t shy away from that word complicated in the title.” The conclusion: “In an appendix it contains an amusing playlist of car tunes, which is really an indispensable part of any road trip. Nicely done.”
I was particularly happy to see that the author — from the links, I’m guessing he or she is a cyclist in Toronto — mention my argument that sprawl encourages impaired driving. I’m not sure any other reviewers even noticed that, which I think is unfortunate.
Tom Vanderbilt, the author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reviews Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age for the New York Times: “Throughout the car’s life, Ladd argues, its critics have often ‘failed to appreciate the depth of the automobile’s hold on ordinary people,’ reaching for conspiracies to help explain the ubiquity of car culture when the answers seem far simpler. The car, beyond any symbolic power, is usually the fastest — if far from the healthiest — way to get around. But this itself contains a point that the car’s boosters, Ladd argues, often ignore — a so-called path dependence. Once you started to make room for the car in the landscape — doing things that made the car ‘an easy, convenient, even necessary, but not always wise choice’ — it was hard to turn back.”
I am no fan of hockey’s designated goon — the marginal skater who plays four and a half minutes a game and is really just in the lineup to fight — but I don’t really have a problem with two talented players dropping the gloves. Last night Milan Lucic, the promising young power forward with the Boston Bruins, and Mike Komisarek, a good defenceman with the Montreal Canadiens, went at it. Watch the video — or, more properly, listen to it — and tell me the fans don’t like fights. The Garden crowd is going absolutely nuts.
Over at Inkless Wells, Paul Wells has a cool map that shows how high-speed railroads will cover Europe by the 2020s and points out that a similar map of Canada will look exactly as it does now — completely empty — unless we start investing in fast trains now. A TGV for the Windsor-Quebec City corridor has been a no-brainer for decades and now makes even more sense given our environment, our economy and our need to improve our competitiveness. Alas, although this country was built on the railroad, today’s politicians are too weak and small-minded to make such an obvious and logical decision.
Rahm Emanuel is Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood agent and the inspiration for Ari Gold, the hilariously over-the-top agent played by Jeremy Piven on the brilliant Entourage. And Ezekiel Emanuel is, according to this 1997 New York Times article, “an oncologist (with a doctorate in political theory) who is a nationally known medical ethicist at Harvard and a leading opponent of assisted suicide.”
Thomas Friedman takes on the American car companies for not innovating and argues that any government bailout should only come with some tough conditions. He’d also like Steve Jobs — “who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation” — to run one of the automakers for a year.
Hypermiling is the Word of the Year for 2008, according to the folks who put out the New Oxford American Dictionary. The OUPblog notes that the term was coined by Wayne Gerdes in 2004 and that “many of the methods followed by hypermilers are basic common sense—drive the speed limit, avoid hills and stop-and-go traffic, maintain proper tire pressure, don’t let your car idle, get rid of excess cargo—but others practiced by some devotees may seem slightly eccentric:
• driving without shoes (to increase the foot’s sensitivity on the pedals)
• parking so that you don’t have to back up to exit the space
• “ridge-riding” or driving with your tires lined up with the white line at the edge of the road to avoid driving through water-filled ruts in the road when it’s raining.”
In wake of last week’s vote in Washington state, “Landscape evolves for assisted suicide” in the New York Times looks at how things have changed since Oregon led the way. There’s also a good discussion over at the paper’s blog. One poster, calling herself MaineGranny, wrote:
“After nearly 30 years in a nursing home (which she had entered at age 52 following surgery for brain tumors), my mother-in-law decided to stop accepting food.
Once the staff realized what she was doing, they started tube-feeding her.
After several episodes of that sort of torture, she gave up and lived another five years or so. This was in the 1990s, before our family had any options for helping her.
An aphasia patient, she could say only one word, from age 52 on up: ‘Why?’”
Among the changes we can expect to see once Barack Obama becomes president is a more enlightened approach to emission standards. According to John Ibbitson in today’s Globe and Mail, “The rejection of California’s proposal to tighten automobile emission standards will be switched to approval. Seventeen other states have said they plan to follow California’s lead.” No doubt even more states will join the parade after the approval and we’ll see increased pressure to go along here in Canada.
The good people of Washington State not only helped elect Barack Obama on Tuesday, they also approved Initiative 1000, which allows doctors to give terminally ill patients lethal doses of medication.
Washington becomes the second state to legalize assisted suicide after Oregon, where voters approved a similar measure in 1994. Emboldened advocates of dying with dignity will soon target other states. According to a piece in the Seattle Times: “Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, a national right-to-die organization based in Denver that has provided financial backing for I-1000, said her group hopes to pass similar initiatives in other states in the future, though it hasn’t selected any specific states yet.”
And an article in today’s Vancouver Sun suggests the residents of Canada’s western-most province may soon get a chance to consider something similar: “Since British Columbians share many cultural traits with the residents of Washington and Oregon, including the lowest religious institution attendance rates on the continent, it is inevitable the debate will flow north across the border.”
“We fear that a $1.50 drop in gas prices was all it took to blunt Detroit’s newfound fervor for energy efficiency,” begins an editorial in the New York Times today. It concludes:
“Gas prices are falling now because the world is tipping into what may be the deepest recession since the 1930s. At some point that will end.
Detroit’s problems will not, unless the automakers understand that the days of cheap energy are over. The Big Three made the wrong bet in the 1990s when they decided to put all their eggs in the truck basket — ceding virtually the entire car market to their Asian rivals.
They evidently haven’t learned enough from their mistakes. Perhaps Congress, from which the automakers are lobbying for more taxpayer money, can help correct their ways — at the very least — by attaching strict fuel-economy requirements to any future aid.”