This Blog Is Going Smash

Every now and then we like to promote projects we believe in. Ballast is one of those projects. Led by Winnipeg-born journalist Paul Hiebert and Vancouver-born thinker Jonathan Hall, Ballast is an upstart Canadian news site, “where thoughtful people gather to discuss the day’s activities.”

You can find out more and support the project through their Kickstarter campaign (its deadline arrives on Wednesday morning), which includes a great video introduction of the project.

Most impressive of all is their lineup of contributors, who collectively have written for publications such as The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The CBC, Maclean’s, The National Post, The Montreal Gazette, Adbusters, Maisonneuve and Exclaim!, and American outlets such as The New York Times, The Awl, Slate, Salon, The Paris Review Daily and Thought Catalog.

They just need another $3000 to reach their goal of $25,000. Have a look and consider supporting the creation of a new Canadian outlet.

- Joel

America is an homogenous place. Sine moving to New York last January I’ve been surprised to learn how similar the east coast is to the west coast commercially. A K-Mart in Washington State looks, feels and smells the same as K-Marts in New York. Prices are adjusted, but there is a familiarity in every branch within the franchise. This power of recognition is true for large department stores, chain-food restaurants, groceries, movie theaters – almost every brand with a nationally (or regionally) growing presence. The neighborhood is going global.

This is to say that I was surprised recently when I was unable to find a NutRageous candy bar on the east coast, a global product – and highly esteemed among chocolate and peanut butter lovers – I thought was available everywhere. It went like this: one day I wanted a NutRageous although I hadn’t had one in years. I went to the street corner to buy one from the newsstand but they only carried Reese’s peanut butter cups. I went to the Duane Reade’s, to CVS, to every grocery store I could. I went to Manhattan and Brooklyn. I searched in Washington D.C. and Virginia and I could find them nowhere. Yes, they were available on Google, but how could I know these weren’t stale versions of the 1994 original?

When I came home to Washington state, I couldn’t find them at the first two supermarkets I checked. I began to grieve the death of my third favorite candy bar. And then I discovered them in our neighborhood – our locally owned – grocer. It was like finding the last remaining gas station when the world has run out of oil.

We need our independent, local businesses. We need autonomy or we will all go crazy – or worse – we will run out of chocolate. I heard from a Canadian friend only a day ago that she was unable to find Robin Hood Nanaimo Bar Mix where she had always found it before. When I was in Vancouver in March I was also unable to find it. Have you searched for this indelible goodness lately? Has Stephen Harper got hold of Robin Hood, too? Stand on your guard, Canada. Stand on your guard.

-Will

On Monday I moved to Burns Lake. It’s cold and snowy and just a little more remote than Vancouver. It’s also a lot smaller than Vancouver, with a whole new small town culture. When I was struggling to push my loaded cart of groceries over the bumpy, icy parking lot the other day, a random stranger stepped in to help me. On my first day of work at the local college, I didn’t just get introduced to the people in my department, but had a tour of the whole building and was introduced to every colleague along the way. And at the college staff party last night, I played my first game of curling at the local rink. If these experiences are any indication, I think I’m really going to love my new town.

- Linette

This summer, while poking about Edinburgh, I saw it: its wet, yellow gleaming edges, and stocky black lettering. A beckoning call, partnered with a “You’re not good enough to get in!” Maybe you too have wandered across a TED conference sign. Maybe you too have dreamed, been seduced to believe that maybe, just maybe, someday you’ll be invited in.

That someday came for me this past Saturday. Upon dutifully and excitedly filling out forms, I had outwitted 275 other applicants and had become one among a hand-selected crowd to belong to TEDxSFU.

And what a really fantastic event: aside from getting to watch and learn about Taiko drumming during coffee breaks, I heard from all sorts of local guests. Here’s a two-sentence breakdown of some of my favourites of the day:

Shawn Smith encourages sustainable international giving, so that instead of just dumping money and stuff on problems overseas, we think about how we might encourage community growth at its heart. Think: giving scholarships through Education Generation to university students in India or Peru so that they can give back to their own communities by becoming doctors, teachers, policy-makers, and so on.

Trisha Baptie knows from having spent several years working on streetcorners in Vancouver’s DTES that the sex trade means violence against women. Rather than fight to create safer working conditions, however, Baptie’s Honour Consulting aims to abolish the sex industry altogether (porn included), through re-directing criminal prosecution, away from sex workers and towards Johns—including Pickton, whose trial Baptie has covered as a journalist.

Quyn Lê was blinded at two, fled Communist Vietnam at 9, drifted at sea before being held as a refugee on an Indonesian island for four years, and was labelled with cognitive development problems as a suddenly ninth-grade student upon arriving in Canada. Turns out, Lê just didn’t know the language, couldn’t read it, and was suffering from some serious culture shock—all things she has had to work through in order to start her own practice as a Registered Clinical Counsellor.

Duane Elverum, an educator at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, co-founded CityStudio Vancouver, a “10-year project [uniting] students and instructors from Vancouver’s 6 public universities and colleges with City Hall on a long-term collaboration to design and implement real-world sustainability projects that help Vancouver reach its Greenest City 2020 targets.” And, he’s looking for folks like us (teachers, employers, employees, students, Vancouverites) to get involved.

—

At the end of the 8 hour day, new TEDxSFU umbrella in hand, I was left a bit overwhelmed, but if you’re like me, these sort of events do exactly what they’re meant to do: bring us from a place of depleted enthusiasm, to a place of thinking we ought to guiltily pile at least three more activities to our list, to a recognition of how we might infuse others’ encouragement (and ideas) into the cool things we’re already doing.

What is it that you’re already doing? Need a bit of a morale boost? Here’s my virtual TEDxSFU high-five to you! You’re doing well, my friend.