Listening to another podcast today, I was struck by another genius idea. PRI’s The World Tech Podcast, hosted by Clark Boyd, out of Boston, is a podcast about technology, generally. The episode that made me think was this on right here, if you wan to listen. The story I’m talking about is halfway through.
Every once in a while, I am dumbfounded by something they report about.
Germany.
Dial4Lite.
An old lady of 85, Steffie lives in a smaller city in Germany. The local government decided that it spends too much taxpayer money keeping the street lights running all night long. So, they turn them off. But Steffie is safe. She can turn the lights on (for a 15 minute interval) by making a cell phone call. On the way to her bus stop, she makes a cell phone call and a voice message tells her how long the lights will be on. A modem is activated when the phone call is made, and the proper code is entered. How do you know the code? They’re listed online, and they are posted on the street lights themselves.
Joggers run with cell phones, travelers in cars have their own lights, and pedestrians (IF they want the light) have the power to switch on the lights for a safer movement down the street.
Many places in Europe want in on this movement, because the waste of energy is HUGE, and silly.
It’s akin to turning off the lights in a room when you leave it. When you don’t need it, why is it still running full blast? It’s plain and simple logic.
Now, I can already hear what naysayers will say…
“Not everyone has a cell phone!”
“Old people don’t know how to do this…they don’t have cell phones, and this will limit them.”
Steffie is 85. She has a cell phone. She is adjusting to the world around her for the betterment of her life.
Instead of sitting at home, and being a victim, she chooses to go out after dark, and return home alone after dark. She knows that if these are her choices, she will NEED a cell phone, and LEARN how to use it to turn the street lights on. If you don’t adjust to infrastructure change, with fair warning, you deserve to wallow in your lack of willingness to adapt.
It lends itself to the bigger argument of whether newspapers should stop wasting paper (like crazy) and simply go online.
“But that means only rich people will get the news!” is a line I’ve heard from some.
But what if this decision needs to happen for the business to stay afloat? What if you have two choices. A) Get news online from newspaper that has made shift to the web or B) Paper goes out of business, and you get nothing.
Trust me, people will adapt. People will get what they need to adjust. And I take issue with the lack of foresight and strategy to move ahead technologically, waiting on a grumpy, unwilling public because they fear basic change.
The solution isn’t necessarily that everyone would need an internet provider either. Mesh networks, and GROUPS of people choosing to equip a neighbourhood or apartment building with wi-fi internet would allow groups of people to have the internet, cheaper, and available for all those folks who think the internet costs a fortune.
On the far end…I believe, if one wants the news bad enough, that the libraries have free web-ready computers to use.
I digress. This technology of energy saving is beautiful. So simple. Energy savings. Tax dollars saved. And the elimination of light pollution?! Hello?! We could see the stars again at night! Imagine that!
Is this kind of move too advanced for your hometown? Is it asking too much to keep streetlights off unless otherwise needed by making a simple phone call? I think it’s exciting to think about, and something to consider for communities across the country.
The day my roll-away rim fell through my car’s windshield, it had to go.
I got the rim for free using Freecycle.org
I could not believe my luck the day I saw the availability listed in my inbox “subject” line. I had recently moved, and I didn’t have a rim nearby. I will grow to be the size of a house if I don’t play a couple of times per week. It was a victorious moment getting this behemoth out of the lady’s driveway and into Phog Lounge’s truck. It was the most dangerous drive I’ve ever taken, as it wanted to tumble out of the truck bed at the slightest degree change in direction. Turning a corner was almost impossible. It was so traumatic, getting it to my house, I think I blocked out most of the trip.
I do remember the woman who gave it to me, when she said, “We have to get rid of it, it fell and almost went through my neighbour’s kitchen window. There was a wind storm.”
Fast forward to the decision to bring this basketball hoop to Phog. It had to leave my house. Dreaming of having it somewhere close to (attached to) Phog was something I thought unfathomable. Why?
Frank.
But, when I dragged it downtown (literally dragging it out the back of my minivan, scraping the road at every minor dip) Frank really didn’t say a thing. It was a bit of a miracle. I always hoped I would catch him shooting hoops when driving downtown one day, but it never happened.
Getting the rim to Phog was harder than getting it to my house. I had to stop twice, as it was falling out of the back of my van. These things are shaped like very tall esses. Like the letter “s” only thin and tall. No matter how you place it, it stays virtually the same shape. It was hell. I had to drive with one hand on the wheel, and one hand pulling ceaselessly on the hoop.
Unloading it was like finishing a major home renovation. I was making something new!
Customers could shoot a few hoops, joining my love for the game with their love for beer and music. People would play before we opened, while we were open, and after we closed. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before from the music community.
“Hey, wanna go shoot some hoops? Yeah? Hey Tom, can we get the ball?” became something I was beginning to hear more and more. I enjoyed hearing it more and more often. Even better was hearing the basketball (extremely faint) bouncing in the alley that I had swept clean for the first time in five years of business. The grit, the garbage, the homeless disjectamenta, bottle-caps from proprietors passed were all push-broomed out of sight, all for the sake of the game.
I played every chance I got. When I wasn’t biking to work, AND when I was, I would arrive and shoot baskets alone, until inevitably, a passerby would stop and say, “Can I get a shot?”
Of course, I gave them a shot, which turned into 20 shots. Yes, there were some people who actually could play, and there were screwballs wanting to show off for their young sons. There were shirtless weasels and weasels of another kind…lawyers heading to their parked cars. Normally, this trek consisted of a slight realization that they were standing next to the Capitol Theatre. Especially before Dave Kant added his giant artwork to the south end of the alley-wall of Phog. Now there was a reason to engage someone they had never met.
The dry cleaner across the street is a Chinese man. Metro Dry Cleaners. I’ve never said a word to him. Never needed to. I don’t dry clean anything. But when he saw me shooting one day, he meandered over University Avenue and nodded at me. We simply exclaimed how great it was to have the rim out there. Did I bring it from home? Yes, I told him. Great idea, he said. He took a shot. Just one. I invited him to shoot any time he wanted.
My main worry was that it would get torn down by local assholes out on Friday or Saturday night. I fully expected it to be vandalized, like many other good things downtown can be. Surprisingly, it is one of the only pieces of property that isn’t festooned with a god damn Denial sticker. Sorry Dan, but give me a break already.
Local and touring bands have found energy-inducing fun with this rim’s short life. You Say Party, We Say Die! and members of Winter Gloves had a two-on-two battle with myself included.
Here’s some video evidence.
Andrew MacLeod and I had an epic one-on-one game, after he had played on a Saturday evening and was liberally lubricated to the point that I could actually win the game. We played in what we had on. I in my Chuck Taylors, and he in his sandals. Jeans and corduroys were our uniforms. George Manury, a southpaw, shot baskets with me one afternoon after he planned to do so. It was a chance to talk to him without the usual social distractions I face when talking with him during business hours. It was great.
If you want to understand downtown Windsor on a weekend, imagine Mardi Gras. There might be more American kids between 19 and 21 than there are on Bourbon Street. It is a throng of alcohol-fueled hormonal outbursts, speckled with violence, drowned in stupidity. Imagine the sound of that. Imagine how loud, how overtly raucous this would be every weekend. Got it? Okay, I’ll continue.
After a show, one Saturday night, a couple of the customers want to shoot some hoops while I’m closing the bar. They take the ball and shoot around. When I finish my duties, I exit the building to get the ball, but I take a few shots first. I think I remember Ryan Fields making a shot from the street (!) which is almost 40 feet away. Nice! I also remember seeing the flashing lights of an ambulance down the alley toward the North. Not unusual. Someone pummeled someone else for looking at them the wrong way. So macho. People are screaming and yelling at each other as the bars empty.
“Hey bitch! Where you goin’?”
“Fuck you, dude!”
“AAAAHHHHHHHH, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
“Wait up!!”
“Stop!! Cabbie!! Stop! Fuck!”
This is the language and tone of the streets of Windsor on the weekend. Living downtown would be awful for this reason. Alas, if you choose to live downtown, you’re kind of up shit’s creek without a paddle because you chose to live in the city-centre where activity is encouraged. I suppose if I didn’t want to experience this I would live on the outskirts of downtown, rather than on ground zero.
As we are playing, a police car approaches.
“Shut it down fellas. We got a noise complaint.”
We looked at each other, frozen, wondering how anyone could actually complain about a bouncing ball with the most ridiculous noise happening steadily for the previous 10 years, let alone the previous 20 minutes.
We stopped.
We went home.
A couple of weeks later, an un-uniformed police officer comes into Phog. Nice guy. He tells me that if we get another complaint about the basketball, it will be bad. Very bad. Very costly. Someone in the Victoria Park Place apartments has complained. I asked if it was possible for someone else to complain, without just cause, was I still culpable and punishable?
“Just don’t play anymore,” he said.
“Like, I can still play during the day, right, the noise bylaw is after 11pm, right?”
“Nope,” he said, pulling out an official piece of paper, “your license says that you have to abide by the noise bylaw 24 hours a day.”
I remember shaking my head a little, like a cartoon character shaking away the cobwebs after a fall.
“Okay,” I said reluctantly.
Since then, it got cold, then it snowed. No b-ball.
But when it warms up, I might just have to draft a letter to the residents of that building.
I might have to inform them of our willingness to play only before a certain time of night.
They need to know what petty complaints are going to do to a small community. A community of people began engaging one another in a way that was absent before the installation of the hoop. That engagement will dissolve.
And yes, I have a problem with someone sitting in their castle balcony, making phone calls about noise (in a place where noise is environmentally apt) adversely affecting a community-at-large.
This is a classic Windsor thing, where someone makes noise complaints on a night when there is such a din, you can’t tell one sound from another.
It’s like choosing to live at the end of an airport runway, and then calling to file a noise complaint, to ground all future flights. Consider your surroundings before you decide to move in and reign supreme over your dominion.
There is more at stake than you can see from your perch.
I love the entire idea of Martin Luther King Jr.
His bravery, his strength, and his conviction still moves me when I read about him, or even think about him.
It’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day today, in case you didn’t know.
I know this because it is the “bands play to famous speeches” tomorrow night at Phog.
I was listening to various speeches over the last few days, to select some speeches.
Listening to “I Have A Dream“, and “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” (the last speech he ever made in Memphis, in support of the garbage workers’ strike) I am moved in a way that I am rarely ever struck emotionally. Listening to his speeches…to the overwhelming awareness, foresight, it makes me incredibly grateful that Dr. King was the man he was.
I cannot imagine a world where he did not exist, with all of his helpers, followers, and supporters…each as brave as him.
Listening to him, he makes you feel like, you too, can make a contribution. You can effect change. You can make a place better by being brave enough to think, and to do so while being in your truth.
Dr. King, seriously, is one of the figures I think of when I imagine Windsor climbing out of the doldrums. He’s the man I think of when I sadly shake my head at the examples of poor leadership anywhere…but especially in Windsor and Detroit.
He wasn’t a “politician” even though he was political…and he had to think politically. He was a man. He was a man with an idea of how the country/world should be.
On this day, I wish to find more people like him. And when they’re found, to honour them for their strength, wisdom, and bravery. I wish to wonder for a world better than it was when I entered it. Thinking and remembering Martin Luther King Jr. brings hope to that possibility. There are those extraordinary among us, if they only feel the purpose to engage.
I love when smarter, more qualified, legitimate pundits echo my thoughts. I just wish they were around to back me up when naysayers are piling up on me!
Here’s a great article about green jobs, green economy, from the CEO of the David Suzuki Foundation, Peter Robinson. GREEN JOBS ARTICLE.
It’s too bad it needs to come from the CEO of the Suzuki Foundation to make an impact for some.
But, if that’s what it takes…read away!
Jhoan went to Zehrs the other day.
She picked up one of the dirty little chickens.
Damn, how I love those scrumptious, oily, brown little chickens.
I knew she was getting it. I knew I’d be digging into it, ripping every shred of meat free as soon as I got the chance.
I could see it. Though the clear plastic top-bubble, as it sits in the black plastic bottom-bubble.
I want to eat another one, just thinking about yesterday’s.
When Jhoan arrived with the food, I couldn’t wait. But I couldn’t see it. “Where’s the chicken? You said you were getting one,” I said.
“It’s right behind you,” she said.
When I turned, it was indeed on the table. However, I saw immediately why I had glazed over it (mmmmm…glaze).
It was different in some way.
Zehrs for some stupid reason, decided to add packaging to this plastic bubble. It wasn’t enough that they were selling like, like…hot and greasy chicken. They decided to add a comfort handle to make them MORE appealing. God forbid that someone has to use two hands to pick up their dinner.
This kind of thing must seem like a great idea in the design headquarters, but in reality, it is a disgusting waste of paper in lieu of a sticker with the nutritional facts on it.
Am I being too picky or is this an irresponsible move? How many thousands of these babies are going to sell, and with them, stupid paper carriers that are going to end up in the recycle bin (assuming they’re recycled)? It’s like the silly paper sleeve that covers the hot take-out coffee cup. The waste is numbing. I really can’t see how this was brought to a board, approved, and rolled out.
Adam and I had a great show today.
I had to record my interview very last minute (yesterday), and edit it very late last night.
Maya Ruggles from FedUp Windsor Community Gardening, came to Phog last night so I could interview her, as she had knee surgery this morning, when I might have been able to do a phone interview. She was game for a phone interview, from home, no less than two hours after her surgery, but having had two knee surgeries (including something very similar to her procedure today) there is no way I would expect ANYONE to talk to me for 10 minutes after that gruesomeness.
The piece was maybe one of the best I’ve done since Adam and I started recording Not In My Backyard. I just got a real sense of groundbreaking, up-and-coming buzz around the work that Maya and FedUp is doing. It was great to talk with her and to get a greater appreciation for what they’ve done and for what lies ahead. I think I see some volunteering in Jhoan’s and my future with FedUp.
Adam interviewed Chris Mangin of Artcite over the phone, and discussed Art’s Birthday. No, not the dude, Art…but art, the expression. It’s having its 1,000,046th birthday this year, and is being celebrated at Phog Lounge. During the interview, I was surprised to learn that The Situationists (Socialist Parisian artists in the 60s) had a hand in how this event is celebrated. For those of you paying extra-close attention, The Situationists were the “originators” of psychogeography, something I’ve been involved in locally a bit, and would often travel through Paris with a map of London, TRYING to get lost in order to see the city from different eyes.
If you missed the show and you want to listen, go OVER HERE!!
Why not? Well, I look at the dudes on their bikes, huffing and puffing on clear-road days, wearing a mixture of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear with a hodge-podge of knitted hats and scarves or balaclavas with mismatched gloves…and they look like they had to spend 20 minutes getting dressed for their ride. Also, some folks have these super-pants (all I can think to call them) with seemingly light jackets. They look like they’re going to freeze. But likely, their jacket is some sort of ultra dense polymer-mix weather-resistant beast that MUST’VE cost a fortune.
So I have to either look like a Value Village on two wheels or pay through the nose to justify riding my bike 20km every work day.
Well, I began feeling like both of these two options is totally worth it. Worth the money or worth the look.
Last night, reading some older issues of Spacing Magazine, I was dumbfounded by some of the statistics about cars. Not the pollution. Forget that for a second. Just the space these things need is silly. Parking where you live, parking where you shop, parking where you’re going, and almost for FREE.
The author of one of the article postulated that raising the cost for parking WAY UP would only serve to discourage car rides when walking or biking is a doable option. I kind of love this idea. A lot (pardon the pun – hahaha). If you live in Boston and you want to go downtown, you may pay $50 for a day of parking. I can already hear the conversations of people anticipating this cost, “Screw that! Let’s take the subway, or the bus.”
Yes, Windsor would need a respectable transit force before any of this was possible, but I like the idea of discouraging car use by intimidating the wallets of the users. Should NO ONE have cars? No. I don’t think that. In fact, the idea of car-sharing in Toronto and New York, and other cities is hugely intriguing too. The bummer of car sharing, and many of these forward thinking shifts in transportation ar that they have to start in MAJOR urban centres…unlike Windsor. We get to sit around and wait for these initiatives to get used, proven, popular, and then passed on…
Parking is such a stupid thing, when it’s examined in terms of space. I fully plan on mapping all the parking downtown on a Google Map. All of the dead, mostly unused or underused space. I always hear that there’s no parking downtown from people, especially in the Windsor Star Letters to the Editor, but what they mean is that there’s not enough FREE parking. Like at Devonshire Mall. They want downtown to be a mall. FREE!! Well, the mall wants you to drive from the moon and back to get their stuff. I think the goal of urban retail and entertainment spaces should be to expect fewer cars and less traffic in areas of retail. I mean, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it has been proven to improve business when traffic is significantly lowered in urban areas.
I digress. I wanted to look at something I seem to remember from when we first opened Phog Lounge. There was a discussion about paying for parking, as a business owner, for any parking space that we, the business, could not provide to the customer. If we didn’t have a huge lot attached to us, we would (supposedly) pay for enough spots, corresponding to our capacity. How in the hell is this making sense? The business owner is being penalized because of the HUGE space-gobbling vehicles that people drive to their business? And for me, I have tons of customers who WALK, drive scooters and bikes, and don’t USE parking spaces on the street, in the lot, or anywhere. I think this kind of gouging for the city to offset infrastructure costs is just dumb. If they want to discourage cars from overloading downtown or their BIA, don’t charge the small-business owner, charge the person who chooses to drive alone in a car designed to tow, pull, carry way more than it is ever used to do.
Which brings me back to the bike thing. I just keep realizing how dumb cars are, in the capacity that they are currently used. They don’t get to use their speed (congested traffic), space (single drivers are rampant), power (moving one person only and almost never transporting goods), and are becoming more and more silly. They are, obviously, way more of a status symbol and inhibitor of exercise and connecting to the environment around us.
Jane Jacobs has suggested that as people think trucks get in the way, it is in fact cars that are in the way of trucks. Trucks employ people, they move goods, and they are economic pluses. Cars are buzzing around, taking up WAY more space than needed (which is extraordinarily expensive), and they are not contributing financially the way trucks do. If trucks were the road owners, and loads of cars left the roads, it would actually improve environmental situations with fewer vehicles on the road (less congestion, less idling). Which would beg the question…if we were a city who thought progressively, and we raised prices for parking, reduced car use, implemented a solid transit system, and consolidated our interests in a less-sprawling nature, and trucks were the kings of the road (the few bits and pieces that would still be in use), where in the heck would the next bridge crossing go? What would be made of the DRIC/Greenlink stuff? Where would it make sense to put it then? Hmmmm….
As for biking…I am anticipating warm weather LIKE CRAZY so I can bike to work every day. But should I wait? How much will I have to pay to outfit myself with warm gear that will keep me dry? Where would I buy this stuff? Why isn’t there a bigger bicycle persona in this area? I know lots of cyclists who tell me about all these other HUGE cycling enthusiasts and bike shop owners, but they’re almost invisible when it comes to encouraging new riders, bike education (like what the hell to wear in the winter), etc. Maybe it’s just me, but I had to almost fall into this biking thing by watching Phog customers biking and praising it. Where are the leaders of Windsor’s bike movement hiding? They should be prominent, respected, and referred to when discussing city planning and other such important issues.
My wife and I are seriously considering getting rid of a car from this two-car, two-person household. Save money, get healthy, get connected to the environment. Anyone want to help? I just feel so stupid rolling around in a car these days.
They’ve got this great concept, at least, they’re borrowing it. Kind of like I do with every event I run.
From brokencitylab.org:
Katy Asher, a student in Portland’s MFA in Art and Social Practice program, along with Ariana Jacob and Amber Bell, have initiated a project that “aims to make a vending cart of maps made by people from Portland.”
I love the idea of collecting maps that people have DRAWN! As Broken City Lab posits, it makes for a great outlet to see how people exaggerate distances and sizes of things on a hand-drawn map. We all do it. We run out of room on a map we’re drawing for someone, or we leave a ton of room and find that things are much closer, and we don’t need the allotted space.
It’s a new way of investigating the “psychogeographic” influences that driving a car has on the way we draw a map. Or, conversely, how walking or biking influences the drawing of a map.
I LOVE the idea of a possible mixture of Google Maps and simple hand-drawn maps, much like the recent walk that we held at Phog Lounge. I envision an art show consisting of hand drawn maps overlapped with ACTUAL maps of the area from, Google maybe. And maybe commentary with the person who drew the map to discuss the inconsistencies and reasons for them.
It’s yet another great tool to investigate what works in our (your) city and what doesn’t.
Awesome.
Justin, I absolutely love everything your group is doing! Dammit!
I feel inspired now. Thanks you.
In The Windsor Star a few days ago there was a front page article about a Windsor relic. This blew my mind, because very little attention in the mainstream population goes toward heritage sites and our fine city’s history. And then wham! This article announces several places slated as heritage sites, making them harder to simply knock down for another mini-mall or Wal-Mart. Here’s the article about the old 1950s era sign in South Windsor that I’ve always liked.
This stood out to me because just last night I was reminded of neon signs when looking through vacation photos. You see, some people buy mugs, ashtrays, hats, or some other ephemera when visiting a new place. Jhoan and I decided to start taking photos of old neon signs in the cities we visit on vacation. They pop up every once in a while. Last night, leafing through the pictures, I was reminded of this project when I saw a sign Jhoan photographed in Key West, Florida, about 2 miles from one of Ernest Hemingway’s residences. The one with the 6-toed cats.
I figured I’d share that.
Also, there’s an amazing Flickr group of photos from a “Neon Graveyard” in Las Vegas where decommissioned neon signs go to wait, or die. Here’s the link.
Am I crazy, or was the N&D sign on the east end of Tecumseh Road also an older neon sign?
His speech is available 
Adam and I had a great show today.
No, I don’t use my bicycle in the winter.
Here Be Dragons 