GLOBADOM

Slate reprised its refreshingly honest Slate Votes feature, and to the surprise of some, Christopher Hitchens cast his vote for Kerry.

Now, anyone reading Hitchens lately knows that he is one of the strongest proponents of the Iraq War anywhere, and that he has repeatedly stated his case for it. In other words, even though he’s a self-described Trotskyite, it came as a lot of a surprise that he didn’t back Bush.

I have tried resolutely to avoid turning Wired Cola into the US Politics Channel. But on this case, I am posting, because I think a lot of people have misinterpreted what is going on with his vote.

He was being, as explains, ironic. He compares his vote to the ironic endorsements of Kerry by Buchanan’s pet magazine and by anti-war advocates (though he says he “can’t compete” with those ones).

He says of Bush that he “deserves praise for his implacability.” He describes his vote for Kerry as an attempt to make JFK “get his worst private nightmare.”

This isn’t an endorsement! This is a personal vote being played out as a joke! I’m not saying that as a critique of Hitchens: I’m trying to point out that his vote isn’t a change of heart, it’s an attempt to pee in the punch bowl. I think the truest purpose of Hitchens’ vote is in this sentence: “Objectively, [Kerry’s] election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq.”

Since I really don’t like posting politics, I thought I’d fill this post out with my horse-race assessment. If I had to guess right now, I’d say it’s going to be Kerry. He is showing strange polling strength in the obvious swing states, out of line with his still-lagging overall popular vote numbers. The irony is it is just possible there will be an Electoral College/popular vote split this year, but most likely against Bush.

If you want the counterpoints, it’s that Kerry is spending a lot of time in true-blue states, which is not a mark of confidence. The election markets still favour Bush, and have apparently been leading indicators of polls during the campaign. Slate’s Election Scorecard still shows Bush in the lead, though I would caution that I think the authors are doing more interpretation than they think they are. At least they include an excellent compendium of the raw data they’re using, so you can go through it and make up your own chart. State-specific polling is much more of a crapshoot than national polling, since it usually involves smaller samples, higher margins of error, and other possible issues.

Standard disclaimer: my political predictions are so uniformly useless that in the past they have been useful as an indicator of the opposite of what was about to happen.

The Tafelmusik concert was lovely. They’re a really great bunch of musicians, and played some nice music. The last thing they played was a long Telemann work, and it wasn’t to my taste. But everything else was pure period-instrument gold.

The cat has been remarkably good-natured about the whole stabbed-with-needles experience. I pet it, I inject it, and if I’m clumsy, it might give a startled meow or glance back at me. When I do it right, it doesn’t even flinch. Cat seems a lot happier, too, and much healthier.

Did my usual ride on Saturday, then gawked at a cyclocross race that happened to be taking place in Vanier Park, and then hit a few garage sales. The York House one was a complete bust, but a private garage sale on the way back to downtown saw me pick up a bucket of Lego and a Trail-a-bike for $15. The latter item is a huge bargain: it’s a sort of bolt-on half bike for kids. It attaches to the rear of an adult bike, turning the whole rig into a sort of articulated tandem. No dropping your kid when you’re training, see? I’ll have to find a good home for this thing for a few years (suggestions?) as The Lovely One and I will have to actually conceive a child and raise ’em for a time before we have a need for it.

The riding is getting chilly and dark these days, but good clothing and good lighting make the experience pleasant. I like riding to and from work a lot more than I like driving home from work.

But never mind about the Opera, the really big news on Thursday night was the display in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, explaining their massive renovation plans.

Good. The QE is a big nasty barn, somewhat pretty to look at from the outside, but ridden with hordes of distant or off-angle seats, and merely adequate acoustics. Its only merit as a venue, to my mind, is its size, just under 3000 seats in a typical configuration.

The renovation will narrow and dramatically shorten the seating area. The rear wall will be 40 feet closer to the stage. Seating numbers will be maintained by adding two more balconies and box-style seating along the sides. They expect big acoustic improvements as a result, and the extra space from moving the back wall will be turned into extra lobby space and bathrooms, which are direly needed. Amazingly, the redevelopment team claims the work will be done in two summer closures, without affecting the performance season. Impressive.

The opera du jour at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre was Der Rosenkavalier, a nice, amusing 270-minute comic opera in German. Richard Strauss, written in 1911, but set (with anachronisms) in 18th century Vienna.

The Lovely One wanted to go, and a 2-fer coupon got us there. Because of the terms of the coupon, we had to buy tickets on the day of the show (Thursday), and so we got nice seats, but not quite together. We sat one in front of the other, on the far left of the theatre (we were both literally against the wall), but quite close to the stage.

It was pretty good. I didn’t fall asleep much, which is, cretinously, my default mode in operas. The plot is fairly funny, and much less stupid than average opera plots, which tend to be either very, very stupid, or else they are Coughing Operas, that lovely sub-genre in which a main character gets tuberculosis. You think I’m joking? La Boheme, La Traviata, The Tales of Hoffmann. Add in the modern remakes (Rent) or the other disease operas (Parsifal and many more), and it’s pretty clear that getting a disease was just about the most resonant thing you could present to an opera crowd, aside from sex and death.

I read the plot synopsis before curtain time, but didn’t get a chance to look over the cast bios, which led me into a little surprise in the first act. The first act starts with young Octavian, the “Rose bearer” of the title (basically a courier bearing a silver rose, the symbol of an offer of marriage) in bed with his lover Marschallin, the wife of an army officer.

As I sat watching their little duet, a few thoughts ran through my head: Octavian looks rather androgynous…can a tenor sing that high?

Ahem. Octavian was played by the lovely and talented Beth Clayton, a soprano, just as the role calls for. The opera is notably soprano-heavy: the love triangle that is key to the story is played by three of them. Strauss has some fun with the character of Octavian, since Octavian spends a considerable amount of stage time in drag for one reason or another, and in drag Octavian is pursued by the lecherous and boorish Ochs, who is also proposing to Sophie, the pretty young thing who falls for Octavian at first sight (and vice versa).

On the drive home, I spoke about how I had enjoyed the music, and how the opera plot wasn’t completely stupid, and such. Eventually, TLO asked me if I had enjoyed the lesbian action in Act I.

The music was really nice. This particular production was done well. But this is probably not a great bet for a first opera. You’ll have to ask TLO for advice on that front, though I did enjoy Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has dragons, drunkenness, talking parrot-people, and secret Masonic symbology. You could do worse.

So Eric is going on vacation and recommended you check this out. Just as I went on one of my longest non-posting spells in months.

The reason for the lack of blogging was lots of real, and quite amusing, real life. So if you can wait it out for a few hours, I promise good stories. Teaser: lesbian opera! See? You’ll be back.

Strange medicine in the fridge, needles everywhere, and twice-daily injections. It’s the tawdry tale of all too many endurance athletes, right?

Well, not me. I’m blaming my extremely suspicious-looking collection of stuff on the cat, as it has been diagnosed with diabetes. This means twice-daily insulin injections (which The Lovely One and I practiced on the cat at the vet’s office this afternoon; I have never heard such an aggrieved meow as it delivered when we first jabbed it today. It wasn’t so much a sound of pain as a surprised “what the heck are you doing to me this time?”), special food, and occasionally monitoring the glucose level in the cat’s urine. Fun fun.

Seeing as how the cat already pretty much thinks I’m scary and evil, doing the injections should be quite the bonding experience for us. Twice a day. I don’t think I’ll have the element of surprise on my side for more than a day.

Spent some time in Vancouver this evening, after dropping TLO at work. Started out at MEC, and bought a new set of tire levers to replace the three useless ones and the four destroyed ones I bought this year. This time I spent the extra $1.50 and got a set of Park Tool levers. I haven’t used them yet, but just taking them out of the package fills me with optimism. They’re a lot harder, and feel a lot tougher than the ok-until-they-broke MEC house-brand levers. Lesson learned about saving money by buying quality in the first place? Maybe.

I’m never sure if that’s a good deal. On one hand, I have a lot of stuff where I ended up buying a high-quality product to replace initial attempts at cheaping out. On the other hand, I still have the original $25 floor pump I bought. Maybe more importantly, I’m never quite sure what I want or need in gear until I have spent some time making do. Thus, I started out riding in sweat pants and a Salvation-Army synthetic shirt. Now, I ride in bike shorts, bike jerseys, special bike limb warmers, and I came this close to buying special bike socks today. All that expensive, stupid stuff really does work just a bit better. For cycling, and almost no other activity, you really do want pockets on the back of your shirt and substantial crotch padding.

I hope as I age, I’m getting more thoughtfully cheap.

Also at MEC, I ran into Strider, a friend from university and even earlier. we caught up. He’s doing some fascinating-sounding work involving face-matching, database interfacing, and child pornography (and aren’t you glad I don’t have AdWords now?). But in a good way. It sounds technically stimulating, and I hadn’t even realized that face-matching systems were already a common part of police databases. So as of right now, I’m off crime.

After I caught up with him and offered up a gmail invite, I wandered over to one of the seedier arcades on Granville Street, and played pinball for the first time in ages. Boy was I terrible! But the Movieland Arcade had The Addams Family, Medieval Madness, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Three of my favourite pins. It was great.

Cat diabetes, pinball, and kiddie porn databases. Eclectic!

Maybe the best baroque orchestra in the world, Tafelmusik, is coming to the Champagne Concert series this weekend, in Port Coquitlam. I’m touting this one because I sit on the board of this excellent organization.

If you have any love for baroque or classical music, this is the live-concert deal of the year. Tickets are $25, but only $12 for students.

So, right there you’re paying about half what this same act will cost if you go see them on Friday in Vancouver. Second, the venue, Terry Fox Theatre, is wonderful. It’s an intimate space of about 400 seats with superb acoustics. You’ll love it, trust me. Did I mention free parking? You ain’t getting that downtown.

But maybe the nicest tradition of the Champagne Concert series is the after-concert reception with the artists. Did I mention it’s catered? Did I mention there’s champagne, just as the name might suggest?

No, seriously. Even I, who sit in on most of the board meetings, do not know how we do it, except to say it’s wonderful that we do. And when I say we, I give all of the credit to the rest of the board, who do the real work. I’m not going to name names here, for various reasons, but really, I hope the board is reading this, because I think every one of them has done an amazing job, and we’re putting an amazing product out there.

My main duties this weekend will be arriving at the venue early enough to help move the harpsichord.

Tickets for the whole season are a super-cheap $99 for five concerts. The Tafelmusik concert is on the verge of selling out: call 604 518-6826 if you need tickets.

It’s a book by Matt Seaton. It’s a brief, but superb book. I think it’s the best look inside the mind of an amateur cyclist I’m ever likely to read. Insights like the author’s description of the failure of his will to win are dead-on. His discussion of how his bike racing meshes (rather badly) with his domestic life is exactly right. I shall not say more. Read the review. Go get the book.

Oh, I’ll say one more thing, but it’s merely cheeky: no matter how well the author writes, how much of a saddo do you have to be, no matter what your excuse, to have held a Communist Party card in 1989?

In news closer to home, the Tri-Cites (the one consisting of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Anmore, and Belcarra) are to be subjected to a light rail system. I think this is the wrong choice, a sentiment reinforced by a conversation with my dad, who works for SkyTrain. This makes him both something of an expert on transit issues and a bit biased in favour of a particular transit solution.

To the facts. There were three systems being seriously considered for a transit solution, which mostly meant finding some way of getting people from Coquitlam Centre Mall (or the Coquitlam campus of Douglas College, or the Coquitlam city hall; take your pick as to the most useful description of the area) to the Lougheed Mall SkyTrain station, and thus to the rest of the transit system. It appears the preferred route goes through Port Moody.

The slowest, cheapest option was buses, or better yet, guided rubber-tire transit, which is a doofus stopgap system that amounts to an elevated bus lane. It was apparently dismissed as “too risky,” though I suspect that could be re-read as “too dorky.” Nonetheless, I think it offers few advantages over just running a B-line fast-bus route on the roads, and adding bus-lanes where necessary to speed things up.

The fast, super-expensive option is SkyTrain. 13 minute estimated travel time from end to end. That’s really, really fast! In rush hour, it would be, no contest, twice as quick as any other way of getting from Coquitlam to Lougheed Mall. That’s the kind of speed that puts people in the seats. Coquitlam Mayor Jon Kingsbury disputed that speed estimate, but he’s an idiot. More on that in the next section.

SkyTrain’s dirty little secret is that it roughly pays for its operating costs (not its capital costs) out of the fare box, which is nearly unheard of in transit systems, and Greater Vancouver has about as small a population as you can have and still justify a light rail system. But SkyTrain is expensive and it doesn’t look cute, with those big guideways and big cars.

Light rail is oh-so cute! It’s got cute little trains, it has cute little stations, and it’s all very “human scaled.” It’s also a dog. It’s most of the way to the capital costs of a SkyTrain system, but it can’t carry as many people, and more importantly, it takes 20 minutes to make the trip. That’s not unbearable, but I think the faster trip would be worth the trouble. The gap between trains will also be longer than SkyTrain

Now, back to His Worship, Mayor Kingsbury. From the article above: “Kingsbury said the SkyTrain estimates were unrealistic because they failed to consider stop times of 1.5 minutes at each of the nine stations along the route.” Well, my dad had some strong words to say about that, since the stop times that SkyTrain actually puts in right now are well under 20 seconds, and they sweat that number to the second, trying to get it as low as possible at each stop (I think that 13-15 second stops are done at the less popular stations). With 9 stations on the route, SkyTrain would spend at most 3 minutes at rest on this route, not the 13.5 minutes the unclever mayor wants to claim. I’m not even sure if the light rail system would actually be that slow in practice, though I assume that they’ll use techniques like fare-taking as you board, which slows things down considerably compared to SkyTrain’s pay-before-you-get-to-the-platform system.

So, I don’t think a good decision has been made. I think the resulting system will work, after a fashion, and I’m sure to use it on occasion, and I’ll try not to resent the big headways (6-15 minutes, versus something more like 1.5-5 minutes between SkyTrains). But SkyTrain would be faster, and faster is really important to making a transit system useful and popular.

Despite Global’s overenthusiastic headline, Vancouver gave a tepid no (link permanence not guaranteed) to wards in a vote on Saturday. Turnout was 22.6%, less than half the Olympic plebiscite voting rate, and much less than the last civic election.

Final score was 54-46 for No.

Let me make a few guesses about the reasons for the outcome. In short, the same people who are out there voting in the civic elections (the west siders, to generalize a lot) turned out today. They favoured a system which favours people who actually vote, over one that offered regional representation.

They also, and I doubt this is a coincidence, favoured a system that keeps the number of councillors at a respectably low 10.

There was much back-and-forth about how neighbourhood representation would be aided by wards, or how wards would create a council of warring representatives, each only concerned with their own neighbourhood at the expense of the greater good. I suspect the truth is that whatever magic has resulted in Vancouver, it had little to do with the council chamber election system.

If I ran the zoo, I’d focus on Vancouver’s only real problem, the Downtown East Side. I’d fix it in the only way likely to work: by putting the residents of the area in a culture where it was no longer normal or acceptable to be on drugs, off meds, or otherwise completely messed up. I’d accomplish that in the least popular way possible: dispersion and gentrification. Pop little tiny SRO-type developments into the corners of a wide number of co-ops all over the Lower Mainland. Make the current residents of nasty SRO units live in similarly priced (and probably more spacious) basement suites in the suburbs, just like SFU students. Then I’d do everything in my power to gentrify the heck out of the remains of the neighbourhood, until it was nothing but a pile of condos perched on endless numbers of Starbucks and upscale boutiques.

And that’s why I’m not mayor.