All Creatures Great and Small (book review)

All Creatures Great and Small

I've had enough of politics for a while. Watched the debate last night -- Steve Paikin is an excellent moderator, and kept the debate going smoothly. He really likes politics, and politicians, too, a rare sentiment these days.

I've just finished reading the first Herriot omnibus, a very pleasant book. I didn't read his books when they first came out, but I watched the TV series several times. It reran for years on PBS. So while reading the book, I saw the characters as portrayed on TV, which both helped and hindered, as some of the descriptions were at odds with the appearance of the actors. Never mind, it was a pleasant read, a series of anecdotes that add up to a portrait of the writer and his clients.

Herriot can be sentimental, he's at his best in straightforward story telling. He has a talent for the illuminating detail or remark. His courtship of Helen Alderson was expanded for the series; perhaps Herriot advised on some of the details of what he merely refers to: the long walks they took, the times Helen came along on his rounds, and so on. Herriot doesn' t pretend to be better than he is. He has a temper and self doubts. He doesn't let us in on his innermost thoughts very often, and when he does, we get a fair amount of his feelings for the Dales and their inhabitants. As I've said, these tend towards the sentimental, but his delight in the landscape, the people, and his profession is genuine, as is his regret for the passing of some of the old ways, tempered by his recognition of the value of much of the new. The book isn't exactly a page turner, but its anecdotal structure and plain style (leavened with a dry and pleasant wit) makes it a good bedtime book, one that one may put down and take up again without losing one's place. I will never read it again, but I will give it to someone who can appreciate its plain virtues and pleasures.

Politics: Accountability

     Listened to Rex Murphy's Cross-Canada Checkup on CBC today [January 6, 2008]. The usual mix of rant, hope, trust, cynicism, and naive expectation that if only some pet reform were instituted, all would be well with the world. Well, at least with Canadian politics. Herewith some random comments.

"Accountability"
     A caller from Alberta wanted politicians who represent us to be prosecuted if they make a promise that they don't keep, on the grounds that such a promise is a lie. The man has obviously never been elected to any office in any organisation. The first thing you learn when you are elected is that the largest part of the job is compromise. Usually, you simply can't do what you want to do, or what you said you would do when you want to do it, as there are always people who don't want you to do it.
     Besides, how can you tell whether a politician lied? There are still people here in Ontario that claim that Harris did what he promised. Yes he did - but he very carefully changed certain key definitions before he did it. In my eyes, that amounts to a lie.
     For example, Harris promised to "increase classroom spending." Then he redefined classroom spending very narrowly, so that it amounted to about 50% of the total expenditure on schools, and increased that by 10%. However, he reduced spending in other areas, so that the net result was a decrease in overall spending of about 10%. But he kept his promise! I had predicted exactly this result when my senior high school class asked what would happen now that Mr Harris was Premier. I said: "Mr Harris will keep his promises, but he will first redefine terms so that there will be no actual increase in spending, and there might well be a decrease overall." What's more, Harris increased the provincial debt, a little fact that the NDP haters gloss over or even ascribe to the NDP (I'm sure not intentionally, it's just a slip of the mind. :-))
     The issue of recall is even thornier. Why should a majority of disgruntled voters have the right to recall an MP? [There are always disgruntled voters.] What about the minority of disgruntled voters bwho want to keep him or her in office? What's their recourse? Why should they be deprived of what they consider a reasonable voice in Parliament?
     IMO many voters think that once a person is elected, that person is accountable directly to them. They forget the thousands of other voters, most of whom will disagree on at least one major issue, and many minor ones. They also forget that the MP is accountable to all the people, not just those who voted for him or her.

"MPs represent us, and must do what we, their constituents, want."
     There are several problems with this attitude, the most obvious being that an MP represents not only those who voted for him or her, but also those who didn't. Whose views should prevail? Especially when you consider that most MPs [in Canada] are elected with considerably less than half the total vote, and often with only about a quarter of the eligible vote.
     There is also the subtle difference between representing someone as a negotiator (the US model of legislators) and representing someone as an advocate (our model, also called "responsible government.") A negotiator tries to get what the client wants. An advocate tries to get what's best for the client, whether the client wants it or not, or even knows what it is. The fact is, we have to trust our MPs to do their best for us and the country as a whole. If you have a concern, write. MPs do pay attention to what their constituents put on the record.

"Proportional Representation"
     It might or might not work. My problem is, that there are several systems. Would we have proportional representation nationally, or by Province? If the former, how would the parties ensure that the regions would be well represented? I foresee bitter fights within parties. If Provincially, we might get bitter fights within each province.
     And at what threshold of the popular vote would a party be entitled to a seat?1%? 5%? 3%? 10%? We have over 300MPs, so the threshold matters a lot. 1% of the House is 3 MPs, which could be a significant number when cobbling up a coalition.
     Some suggest that some mix of regional or local representation and national vote should be used. That would result in effectively two elections: one for the leadership and one for the local MP. But we tend to value our local MPs more highly than our national leadership (Illogical, yes, but there it is.)
     Many advocates for PR point to the many democracies that use it. The argument that "Everybody else does it" has never been a good one, as every parent knows. So I'm surprised that apparently sensible people use it. [Besides, there are major differences in the "proportional representation" systems. Moreover, every election system will disgruntle some voters.]

"Why don't the candidates discuss issue X?"
     Because the party's polling has indicated that other issues matter more to more voters.

 Update 2021-09-23: We've just gone through another Federal election, but there was no change. There were a few flips from one party to another, but overall the numbers are almost exactly the same. I fixed a couple of typos, added clarifications, and inserted clip art.

 

Terry Fox

Sitting in the waiting room at the Health Center the other day, waiting for blood to be sucked from my arm for a PSA test, I saw Terry Fox's picture on the cover of Maclean's Magazine. I remembered the time I saw Terry run.

I was on the way to the Sudbury airport to catch a flight to Toronto in order to attend a meeting that at the time seemed important, but whose purpose I have long since forgotten. The bypass had not yet been built so I was driving through a light rain along the old two-lane road. Near Lively, the traffic slowed down. I saw flashing police lights ahead and thought, O damn, an accident, that'll make me miss my flight. And braked to a stop.

Then I noticed that the police car was approaching me, its red and blue lights reflected in the water lying on the pavement. Behind it I saw Terry Fox, I knew immediately who he was, even though his van was some 50 yards behind him. He shifted his weight onto his good leg, made a skipping hop, threw his prosthesis in front of him, and used it as a pivot to bring his good leg over to the front again. His good leg hit the pavement, and he raised himself again in that skipping motion to lift the prosthesis off the ground and bring it to the front again.

Step, skip, swing, step, skip, swing, he came towards me, step skip swing. I began to imagine how many times he must have done that since he'd left the East Coast, thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, and wondered how his leg stump could stand the pounding, how the heel of his good foot could tolerate the repeated thump into the asphalt, how his back could take that twist and lift needed for each step.

My line of traffic began to move again, and I briefly saw Terry's face as he step-skipped past me. A couple weeks or so later we heard that that he had to stop near Thunder Bay because the cancer had come back. I thought, He knew it even then, in Sudbury, that was not just physical pain that marked his face, it was fear that he might not finish his run. I knew then that I had seen courage in his face.

Before I saw Terry, I'd dismissed his run as mere publicity hunting. When I saw him I began to see that Terry knew he wouldn't make his mark as the rest of us have done, in our work, our families, our communities. He would never succeed at any career, he would never be proud of his children, he would not earn the respect of neighbours and friends, because he wouldn't live long enough.

He could have waited for death, worked with the doctors to delay it for as long as possible, no one would have faulted him for doing that. But he felt the need to do something worthwhile. What could he do? He had no skills, no special talents, no training or education. He had only his body and his determination. So he did the only thing he could do: he used his body, he used himself, to draw attention, to enlist the rest of us in the struggle to understand the disease that was killing him, and would kill many others, and continues to kill.

Terry used himself up in doing this. He died doing this.

Every time we drive west through Thunder Bay, we stop at the monument beside the highway, and I remember. We stopped there again this past summer. I sat and looked up at his face, a face that I remembered from a brief glimpse in the rain, and I noticed that people spoke softly as they read the inscription and gazed at the statue of Terry Fox.

Econ 101: Prices and scarcity (a contrarian view)

The news is that gas prices are rising "in response to market pressures", and so on. The news reports talk of prices as if they were natural phenomena, and go up or down entirely on their own. Which is of course utter nonsense. Prices are human constructs, and human decisions cause them to change.

A price does not rise or fall, someone decides to change it. There is no such thing as market pressure, there is only the belief by some people that a commodity is or will be in short supply. If they are sellers, they decide to ask for more. If they are buyers, they decide to offer more. If a sufficient number of buyers and sellers share that belief, and if the buyers cannot do without the commodity, or cannot delay their purchase of the commodity, higher prices will be paid. And so on. The converse happens when some people believe that a commodity will be in abundant supply.

The theory of the free market is said to assume that buyers and sellers have the same or at least similar information, and that the transaction is based on this information. This too is nonsense. Firstly, it is not information that matters, but belief. Secondly, information functions to justify belief, and it is belief that drives the decision to buy or sell. Thus, buyers and sellers may justify their decisions based on some very different information, or disagree about the significance of common information.

Either way, however, it is the apparent scarcity that drives pricing decisions. Both buyer and seller will attempt to control information, but for opposite reasons: the seller, to make the commodity seem scarce, the buyer to make the commodity seem abundant. Scarcity justifies the seller asking for more, abundance justifies the buyer's offering less. Thus the only information that seems relevant to pricing is information about scarcity.

It is the function of advertising to make the buyer believe that the commodity is scarce in some way. This is true even of advertising that offers goods at lower than usual prices: the implication (sometimes explicitly stated) is that goods at this low a price are scarce, so get them now before the price is raised. Luxury goods are luxury goods not because they are better than other goods, but because the sellers and buyers conspire to limit the supply: there must be just enough of the precious item available that only those few worthy of owning one can buy it. Scarcity explains the high values placed on antiques, most of which are merely the kitsch of earlier generations. But people discard kitsch in enormous quantities, so that little of it survives. Scarcity accounts for the high, sometimes outrageously high, prices paid to athletes and actors for their performances. The ultimate scarcity is that of the item advertised as unique, tens of thousands of which are sold to people who hope thereby to express and announce their unique individuality. What's truly scarce, apparently, is individual worth.

The Hike up Parker Ridge

 

Parker Ridge Trail is a popular hike. The parking lot was about half full. The information posters showed the flowers we could expect to find along the trail. Marie studied these, and stopped frequently to examine the flora. Several other people set out from the parking lot the same time as we did. We were: Robert and Roswita, Tim, Jenn and Vic and CJ and Caitlin, Peter and Marge, Catherine F, and Marie and me. A dozen of us.

They first hundred yards or so are easy, and most hikers struck a brisk pace. I foresaw a stiff climb up the steep mountain side; Tim had studied the maps (he's a geographer), and told us it was a 1200ft vertical difference in about 1-1/2 miles of trail. Recalling what I had learned about hiking as boy in Austria, I started walking at what even to me seemed a very slow rhythm, and let others pass me. Eventually, I passed most of them.

Within a couple of hundred yards up the trail, I knew I'd made the right decision. I maintained the rhythm to the top, never varying its speed, just taking shorter or longer steps depending on the terrain. About 1/3rd of the way up, I passed a gentleman who had raced ahead of me. He was standing by a bench, chest heaving, chuffing like a broken steam engine. I greeted him without pausing, and kept on. The wind picked up the higher I got, and began to chill me, despite the wind-proof jacket I wore, and which had seemed too warm just minutes earlier, when I was sheltered by the forest. I reached the top before the others.

I carried a kite that had never flown. At the top, there were two stone-built low shelters, one occupied by a family of four. I sat down in the second one, it reached part way up my back. I was glad I'd tied my hat on, else the wind would have blown it down into the valley. Then I flew the kite, a parasail about 20" wide. I paid out about 150 yards of line, and watched the kite soar off the brow of the ridge and out over the valley. The rest of our group saw it, too, and took some photos. CJ showed up, and held onto the kite. The wind was strong, he hard a hard time holding it. Eventually, I reeled the kite down. Tim helped me retrieve it as it came into the turbulence below the ridge and dived onto the rocky ground.

On the other side of the ridge a small hollow sheltered us from the wind. We had our lunch there, sitting in a raggedy row along the east-facing slope. To the north, a small pine tree, sheltered by the hollow, demonstrated that the tree line is a zone, within which minor differences in micro-climate determine whether or not a tree survives. After lunch (and lots of photographs), we held a short ceremony committing Mum and Dad's ashes to the ground, scattering them under the pine. I read parts of the service from the Book of Common Prayer, which Mum preferred over the more modern forms. Catherine F. read a few words on her own behalf, and a letter from old friends on the Island. We stood for few moments in silence, said the Grace, and broke up.

We went on the trip because Roswita insisted on it. At first, I didn't think much of it, agreed mostly because Roswita is my favourite (and only) sister, and because it was a good excuse to see Tim, and Jenn and her family. But Roswita was right, it was good thing to have a committal rite.

I printed off some of the photos for Cassandra, Niobe, and Jon. I especially like the one of the tree with the higher mountains in the background, for Parker Ridge is only the first in a series of ridges that lead up to the peaks. I used a cheap panoramic camera, the kind that magazines once gave away as subscription premiums, and which one could find at Value Village. This one has a glass lens, so it takes reasonably sharp pictures. I will use it again.

Trip West 1: highlights

Highlights

1) The drives there and back, marked by light traffic, good weather, and a relaxed mood. We stayed in so-so and very good motels, never phoned ahead, always found accommodation that was at least acceptable. But we also now know which ones to avoid. Ate well, especially breakfasts: two eggs over easy, bacon, toast and coffee always works. Ate twice at Rossport's Serendipity Cafe: excellent food, lovely view over Rossport Bay.

2) Family: we saw almost everybody, only Peter Edenloff couldn't make it to Camrose while we were there. More later.

3) The hike up Parker Ridge, the flying of the kite, and the memorial service for Mum and Dad.

4) Railways in Jasper (CNR and VIA) and Schreiber (Northern Ontario CPR). And a surprising number of trains on the prairies, l-o-o-o-ong trains!

5) The Costume Museum, Drumheller and area, Donalda Art Gallery, Camrose railway museum. More later.

6) Maligne Canyon, the art gallery at Jasper Park Lodge, Maligne Lake, the Rockies, Pembina River gorge, Sunwapt Falls.

7) Time together with no deadlines, no meetings, no stuff we had to do.

And that's it for tonight.

PD James, Monarch Butterflies, solar powered radio

Jon told us about a BBC Radio4 program on forensic language analysis, presented by P. D. James, so we listened to it. Some analyses of recordings are definitive: the analyst can say what a mumbled or poorly recorded word is. At other times, analysis of words and phrases (the so-called register) reveals that a suspect's oral confession was in fact read from a statement prepared by the police. And so on. Grist for the crime novelist's mill, I suppose, but also a salutary reminder that every person's language exhibits sufficient idiosyncracies that attempts to influence a suspect's statement are likely to be detected.

Marie planted an asclepias last year, having heard that it was a good one for attracting Monarch butterflies. Earlier this evening, we saw four Monarch caterpillars having a good feed. Just now, Marie told me that they were noticeably fatter, the li'l gluttons. They will have turned into chrysalises by the time Bria and Connor get here. With luck, they will be able to the chrysalises. Asclapius is a shrubby plant about 2ft tall, with large ovoid leaves on the stems, and umbels of small white flowers. The Monarch caterpillars like the leaves, which must be extraordinarily fattening for Monarchs, as there is little evidence of their voraciousness, yet they thrive.
Update 202 06 20: The asclepias is still growing, but the monarch butterflies have all but disappeared.

I bought a small solar-powered radio from Lee Valley some time ago. Not exactly good in iffy reception areas, such as our deck (where several reflected signals intersect), but it will run without batteries, and without turning the built-in charger, so it's a Useful Tool. Sound is tinny but clear enough, and not very loud even at max setting. Recommended. Look it up in your Lee Valley catalog. We listend to Sound Advice while eating supper which tells you how late we ate.)

That's enough.