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Long odds and 2010

WMD: The latest Couier column, examining the recently unveiled lottery for seats at the 2010 Games opening ceremony:

Olympic ticket lottery symbolizes out-of-reach dreams

VANOC should put more tickets up for grabs to give working families better chance to participate in party they're paying for

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 24, 2007

For those who have given up hope of buying pricey tickets to 2010 Olympic events, especially the opening ceremonies, there's news. The B.C. Lotteries Corporation announced this week a new lottery (because B.C. residents lack sufficient gambling avenues to part with their money) offering seats to the kick-off event as the top prizes.

As with most lotteries, the cause is worthy and the chance of winning anything of value is miniscule. Money from each $5 ticket will go to amateur athletic organizations, such as KidSport, which helps kids from poor backgrounds participate in sports by paying their seasonal registration fees. Money will also go to travel funds for young athletes and the training of coaches. These are good things.

But if you're angling for a cheap ticket to the Games by participating in this lottery, consider your Wilfrid Laurier a donation only. You won't win a seat. The state-owned bookie that is the Lottery Corp estimates that even with 100 seats up for grabs, your chances of winning an opening ceremony butt post are 1 in 5,000. I'm no deep mathematician, but I'm reasonably sure those are terrible odds. If in my lifetime I had a 1 in 5,000 chance of getting heart disease, cancer, a receding hairline, or a Stephen Harper majority government, I'd be the happiest and luckiest human in the history of the planet.

That's not to say I won't buy tickets. Helping children in sports and the people who coach them is fine. And I'm weak--I can't resist the thrill of scratch and win when buying milk at my local corner store, even though I do far more scratching than winning. But the biggest reason is that a lottery for seats at an Olympic event underscores the same reality painfully illustrated by the many home lotteries in what we now call Metro Vancouver: we can't otherwise afford what is being playfully dangled before us. Just as home lotteries remind us that Vancouver is out of the price range of most families for housing, the seat-lottery's lesson is that the Olympics will be out of the price range for most families for entertainment.

With the cheapest seat running at $175 per person, and the best seats for a mere $1,100 each, the opening ceremonies is admittedly the blue chip event of the two-week Games. It's not the only event to see.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games notes that of an estimated 1.6 million tickets to be sold, more than 100,000 of them will be available for $25, and half of all Game tickets will be for $100 or less. Tickets won't be on sale for another year, but projected ticket prices are already advertised on Vanoc's website, including the $25 spots. And it's true: you and your family of four can pay $100 to stand in the snow at Whistler to see Norwegians and Finns you've never heard of zip by during the biathlon, an event made for the dramatic embellishments of TV sportscasting because, as with golf or Frisbee tossing, watching it live is fine progress toward a coma.

The signature Games events, men's hockey, the inevitable women's hockey showdown between the U.S. and Canada, and figure skating, will cost your family considerably more thanks to prices that are a whole lot more Point Grey than they are Collingwood. For almost all medal events, you'll need another lottery to afford a seat.

The cost for Vancouver families to attend 2010 events wouldn't be an issue if the Games and the infrastructure built for it weren't so heavily subsidized by taxpayers, who are being increasingly told they're going to have to dramatically alter their lives for two weeks so that foreign and local elites can use our town for a party. Take the bus, say from Langley to downtown. Start work at midnight. Be obedient to the thousands of security personnel stifling everyday freedoms. If you're on Cambie, you're living much of this now.

Some recognition for what the mass of taxpayers and city residents are and will endure physically and financially is due, and it should be beyond a few crumbs scattered in the direction of the betting hoi polloi. Instead of a mere 100 tickets offered in a lottery for the opening ceremony, make it a few thousand. Install similar lotteries for the medal events people really care about. Most tickets for most events can still be market-based, since the market is a good chunk of revenue the Games require. But give the middle and working classes, those segments of society we once cared about, and even dared to celebrate, a better chance to participate. Wouldn't that fit the Olympic spirit?

Women were there

WMD: Tod Maffin, the broadcaster and social media  entrepreneur who hosted the Leo Laporte/Amber MacArthur event at Future Shop, wrote to remind me that women were indeed in attendance. Duly noted, and my piece should have reflected that. Which leads to ...

Today's bLINKit: One woman who was there (and there weren't many), was Miss604, whose very good blog is found here. Maffin's site can be found here.

The word from Leo Laporte

WMD: The latest Courier column comes from my interview with Leo Laporte, king of the technology geek journalists in the U.S. He also hosts and produces a tech show taped here in Vancouver. He's one of those rare media people who is in person exactly as he appears on TV or the radio, except perhaps more intense. The original is found here. The rest of the column follows:

Technology guru shares wealth of 'geeky' information

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Last month, the Future Shop near our office brought in an international star. Well into middle-age, rotund and dressed in a trademark tropical shirt tucked in at the waist, California-based technology journalist Leo Laporte is probably someone you've never heard about. But what he says is worth listening to.

To geeks around the world, he's a favourite uncle: friendly, funny and heroically interested in everything. To everyone else--from businessmen looking for the latest smartphone to grandmothers confused about why their laptops won't turn on--he is to computers and consumer digital devices what Mike Holmes is to home renovation and repair.

Laporte was invited by the electronics retailer to headline a discussion, broadcast on the Internet, on the future of high-definition televisions. Sitting on a makeshift stage at the back of the store with Amber MacArthur, his brainy Canadian protege and a Toronto-based TV journalist, and CBC technology guru Todd Maffin, Laporte was watched by an adoring crowd of two dozen men in their 20s and 30s, many of them snapping photos or shooting video of the talk. Another thousand or so watched the video feed of the event on Future Shop's website.

Future Shop tells me last month's event was the first of a series of Internet-based forums it has planned as a "community-based" approach to selling products. Laporte was a good first choice for the series launch. He's a rare crossover figure between the world of geeks and what he teasingly has called the "straights," that is people who don't understand--and don't care to--the difference between an iPod and the dozen other brands of lesser-known MP3 players.

But he's no corporate shill. Laporte first came to prominence in the late-1990s as a popular presenter and technology guru with the shortlived TechTV network in the U.S. He now hosts a weekend syndicated radio show broadcast in the U.S. and globally on the Internet, a TV show taped monthly in Vancouver and run on the Canadian descendant of TechTV, and his own series of podcasts, now numbering more than a dozen, ranging from hardcore tech discussions to advice for parents worried about the Web.

When he's not patiently explaining to his radio or TV show callers about how to recover lost email, he frequently savages products, manufacturers and retailers for making life difficult for consumers. He's compared the relationship between consumers and the companies that make the stuff we buy to a war, in which we're in an eternal struggle for devices that work as advertised and which we can reasonably understand.

Laporte brings the refreshing message that if you're having trouble with your computer (or HDTV or cellphone or GPS), it's not your fault. The electronic stuff which now dominates our lives was created by engineers with too much facial hair and too little knowledge of the regular world.

"Useability is as bad as it ever was," Laporte told me in an interview following the forum. "For the average person, tech is still opaque."

He's appealingly non-theological. While a lot more egalitarian (and friendlier) a subculture than most, tech is a world of competing theologies, with Apple fanboys who don't understand why others haven't seen the light, humourless Windows apologists who wish the Applelites would go away, and radical Linux heretics who think we'd all be better off if we knew how to work command lines. Laporte's message is that these devices are merely machines. They are not divinely inspired. If Apple works for you, buy Apple. If a Dell machine is more suitable, get it instead.

But sitting at the back of a store filled with more electronic and computer stuff than anyone would ever need, Laporte had one final note of caution. As a devotee of digital toys whose job it is to acquire and test the latest stuff, from web tools like Twitter and Facebook to just about every cellphone invented, he admits guilt about encouraging rampant consumption. People don't need four iPods, he told me, which leads to his final piece of advice.

"It's not about buy, buy, buy," he said. "It's about using these tools to express yourself. Don't be a consumer. Be a creator."

For all its faults, the new technology has the capacity to liberate us as individuals. And if it doesn't work, you know who to turn to.

'Meet me by the neko slave club'

Today's bLINKit: Corporations that rushed headlong into SL to set up boring corporate sites that no one ever visited are rethinking their approach to virtual worlds, says PC Mag. They're going to use them for meetings. IBM, according to the story, reckons it can save nine years of employee time per week by replacing phone conference calls among its global cadre of 330,000 employees with virtual world meetings:

A virtual meeting space, [Ian] Hughes [of IBM] said, is a good replacement for a telephone conference call, which typically has a lot of "dead" time at the beginning as participants dial in. A virtual meeting emulates a real one, giving people a chance to mingle.

Mingling would be fine, as long as participants don't mind waiting minutes for SL environments to load up, clothes to download, and missing textures to finally kick in, only to see that their counterparts from across the continent have recently gone Gorean and are dressed the part.
 

Gibson at home

WMD: After seeing him appear half a dozen times in recent years haunting the neighbourhood around my office like an apparition of post-hippie art geek coolness, I finally got a chance to sit down and interview William Gibson last week. He was back in Vancouver on the final leg of his book tour for Spook Country, his latest novel. He was 20 minutes late, for which he apologized, but he noted that after weeks of touring he was reaching the end of his ability to keep up with one interview after another. He was also unfailingly polite, thoughtful and intelligently entertaining. Apart from the fact that I dig his writing (although what's up with all the happy endings ...), it was one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had in awhile, largely because he listened, thought and answered in real time, as opposed to spinning off rote answers. That's probably a bonus of interviewing writers.

My latest Courier column, available here, came out of that conversation, although it necessarily contains only a little of what was an hour's worth of Q&A. I've reproduced the text below. We talked largely about Vancouver, where he's lived since 1971. Aside from a short story or two, his adopted home city, for which he has great fondness, has never appeared in his fiction before. I wanted to know why:

Futurist fiction writer never imagined Vancouver in 2007

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 10, 2007

William Gibson's fiction has been set in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Most of it is a vibrantly imagined vision of the near future which, when it first appeared in the 1980s, anticipated the wired and increasingly virtual world of 2007.

It's a future alive in technology, with computer interfaces that rival the Matrix movies, buildings that "grow" into being, and people deliberately replacing parts of their bodies with machines. But it's also a harsh world, with lethal violence on the streets, corporate brawn usurping representative government, and a yawning chasm between rich and poor right out of the Fraser Institute's wettest fantasies.

It's also why, having lived here since 1971, the South Carolina-born Gibson never included Vancouver in his novels. He didn't want to do to his adopted hometown what his imagination had done so skillfully to other cities of the world: make them disturbing.

That reluctance ended with his latest novel, Spook Country, a contemporary tale in which Vancouver plays a prominent role in the final third of the book. But while the novel is a fascinating and often funny meditation on how the U.S. has been thrown dangerously off balance in the wake of 9-11, Vancouver comes across as anything but disturbing. We look pretty good.

Gibson didn't set out to include Vancouver in the story, he told me during an interview last week at a favoured Granville Street cafe. He doesn't like to predestine his narratives. On a good day, he said, "I'm not making executive decisions over the life of my characters."

But as the story developed, and the search by competing and shadowy agencies for a shipping container and its mystery cargo seemingly adrift at sea unfolded, his cast of spooks, criminals and former rock stars landed in our town. Gibson said as soon as he knew they were coming, he was nervous for weeks.

It turned out they liked it here, or at least found little that put them off, as they focused on international intrigue. Vancouver in their eyes is freshly scrubbed and clean smelling. Dollar coins baffle them, and they are surprised to be stuck in horrendous rush hour traffic. But the North Shore mountains amaze them. The green and blue glass condo towers of Yaletown and Coal Harbour look like they were built last week. The locals--with the exception of a Downtown Eastside drug dealer--are friendly, and downtown commuters going to work in the morning have, in the charmingly trippy mind of one key character, a low "f--kedness quotient."

Gibson found it "totally cool" to be a tourist in his own city while writing the book, and the experience his characters went through mirror what he's seen in countless other visitors. Cory Doctorow, a Toronto-born science fiction writer and blogger whose intellectual horsepower rivals Gibson's, once told him Toronto is a place that's easy to live in but hard to visit. Gibson says Vancouver, by contrast, is a city newcomers adore. "I've seen people from Paris fall tragically in love with Vancouver," he said. "And they dread having to return to Paris." Who would have thought Robson Street could beat out the Champs-Elysees.

Yet for a science fiction writer, Gibson never expected the Vancouver we have now. He remembers not only when neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour didn't exist, but also when no one ever imagined Coal Harbour was even a remote possibility. He also never thought Vancouver would become so dense, or that real estate would morph into a gambler's vocation. The rapid change in so short a period concerns him, and he worries about the city's sustainability.

Will he stay? He doesn't know, but only because he says he never knows what the future holds. But it's clear he'd like to remain here. Vancouver gave him a fresh start. The city wasn't as interesting or as big as Toronto, where he spent part of the hippie era after leaving an America convulsed by Vietnam. But it also had no baggage for him when he arrived 36 years ago. His wife is from here, his children were raised here, and he learned to write fiction here, eventually producing some of the most influential novels to come out of Lotusland.

He's grateful to Vancouver for that fresh start, and it shows.

- Gibson appears as part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, which runs Oct. 16 to 21. For more information, see www.writersfest.bc.ca/.

blink@vancourier.com

Today's bLINKit: The Courier's award-winning historical writer, Lisa Smedman, writes about the coming of the Swede-Finns to B.C., as seen through the eyes of her grandmother.

The silver lining ...

WMD: Returning to the theme of Vancouver's "language confusion," this time examining its benefits, with also a nod toward the difficulty facing immigrants. Source column here. Reproduced below:

***

Frustration of garbled English makes us stronger

Kids who grow up in melting pot more prepared for new global reality

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 03, 2007

If Vancouver is turning into a linguistic Olympics for longtime residents, think of what immigrants trying to learn English go through.

That was the point made by at least one of the letters I received in the past week in response to last week's column about Vancouver as a mess of potage when it comes to the diversity of languages now found here. The writer, who identified himself only as Arthur, noted what it was like to come to Canada several decades ago as a visible minority with a heavy accent. When trying to get service, both at businesses and with government, native English-speakers often got impatient with him. Some yelled, others slammed doors in his face. It was the traditional Canadian welcome to outsiders: the cold shoulder only a cold-weather country can give.

Immigration to Canada is much easier now than it was when my paternal great-grandparents, who did not speak English, embarked on a one-way trip to North America more than a century ago to scratch out a living as farmers on the prairie. It was worse for non-European immigrants, who Canadian administrations--barely past the colonial stage--tried to legislate out of existence.

Newcomers, especially from the dominant immigrant streams, today enjoy established communities with familiar language and customs supported by energetic non-profits. But while such support is welcome, the thriving immigrant communities that provide it reduce the need to adapt in a new country.

Some readers reminded me that government funds English training for adult immigrants. This past summer, spending for such programs in B.C. received a minor boost of about $11 million a year, in part to alleviate waiting lists for these services. But considering that B.C. took in more than 42,000 immigrants last year, that's not a lot of money.

And mass language training in classrooms for adults is not entirely effective, as people in the industry have told me. One teacher threw up her arms in frustration, claiming that after months of classroom instruction, adult students--with a "look at me I'm an immigrant" innocence--were still using mangled constructions like "What you name?"

Arthur says he learned English partially through ESL classes. But the bulk of his learning came from listening to English-language radio and on the job as a cashier. That he learned largely on his own is a testament to his tenacity, and that of millions of others like him. It also speaks to the limitations of formal, mass education in language training. Those of you who have long since lost your high school French, learned in classrooms of two or three dozen fellow students of varying cluelessness, understand.

So there we are: a city with lots of newcomers and a visible lessening of commonly understood English in ordinary transactions of daily life. Various ethnic groups--English-speakers included--are hiving off into separate cultural enclaves with their own media, shopping and social celebrations. Governments don't take this reality seriously, except to dole out token grants. And no one has a clue about how our city will look or feel in 20 years. We might not like it.

Is there a bright side? Yes. It's frustrating, as readers noted, to do business with scribbled notes and hand gestures, or to turn to strangers for translation help. But perhaps what does not kill us--but merely annoys us--makes us stronger.

I'm thinking of kids. The debate--such as there is--is still on about the quality of schooling in Vancouver elementary and high school classrooms awash in languages. But students today are learning to navigate very complex cultural and social interactions. It's a requirement to survive socially. That experience can't help but prepare our next generation to be flexible, mobile and, we hope, broad-minded in a world of global markets and global problems.

Paradoxically, the complexity and frustration we face in Vancouver also teaches us the great antidote to prejudice, which is to treat people we meet in this city every day as individuals, and not as stereotypes of whatever ethnic or cultural category we're tempted to cast them into. It's our only realistic choice. Get out and deal with the new Vancouver language confusion by taking people as they come. The alternatives are to stay home, draw the blinds and pretend that nothing has changed--or move to Manitoba.