Posts in the ‘ecology’ Category
Alternate Reality: The Weather Network
Posted on | October 21, 2009 | No Comments
The Weather Network is a portal to another reality. It’s a 24-hour cable news channel where everything revolves around the weather, all the time. Every bulletin and every story segment is about the weather, climate change, or about the weather’s impact on traffic or other aspects of people’s lives (cars spinning out in deep snow, homes destroyed by falling trees or floods).
There is no irony in the Weather Network’s flow: it’s as if the anchors and journalists aren’t even aware that there’s another world out there, one where the weather is merely a small part of people’s lives. Presenters are professionally dressed in business attire and have all the mannerisms of CNN or BBC World: they say things like, “Up next!” or “What an interesting story there.”
During the frequent “news bulletins,” there are even ‘chatty’ parts where two anchors (!) share some informal banter with the viewers, like this:
Anchor 1: We thought we’d start this newscast by showing you some pictures of warm, sunny Toronto yesterday.
Anchor 2: Let’s do it!
Since nothing actually happens during the news bulletins, they are filled with B-roll images from around the country, showing iconic scenes from Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, St. John’s, Toronto… catalogued (in a very large media library, one presumes) by season and weather condition, so that the appropriate clip is shown. For example, one of today’s stories was “Vancouver has Winter Woes of Its Own,” where we learned that winters are hard even in Vancouver because it always rains there:
One of my favourite parts is how the Weather Network has its own weather report. Just after the news, the actual weather report comes on, with a country-wide review of meteorological conditions, followed by an exhaustive local forecast. Of course, there’s also a traveler’s forecast that talks about a number of US cities.
The Weather Network also runs house promos where it tells us why it’s the best Weather Network out there (there are no others). It claims to have “40 meteorologists” on staff who anticipate and report on storms and other extreme weather conditions, and the promo is filled with dramatic images of floods, hurricanes and cars sliding on highways during blizzards.
The high production values of The Weather Network make it eerily similar to the Onion News Network, the Internet’s most brilliant video news satire, where everything is just like real television, only much, much funnier.
Now, you can sort of work out why the Weather Network is the way it is. This is a channel most reasonable people will only flip to for a quick weather check before leaving the house in the morning. Its ‘bounce rate’ must be very high. So the idea of creating ‘sticky’ viewers by offering interesting stories, opinions and banter to hang on to that viewer just a little bit longer must have made sense to someone.
But I like to imagine that there are home-bound people somewhere for whom the Weather Network is a main source of information about the world. Who are continually amazed at the astounding goings-on in Canada’s weather, who are delighted with the “international news” items about tropical storms and Canadian travelers stuck at airports due to white-outs.
In popular culture, the weatherman is typically the newsroom underdog: an aspiring journalist who doesn’t quite measure up to his news anchor brethren and who wears flashy jackets (it’s a waist-up sort of world) or does wacky things to catch our attention.
The Weather Network is the revenge of the weatherman: it’s all weather all the time. Because if you can’t join them, just create your own.
Eating out: The Beet Organic Café & Market, Toronto
Posted on | November 26, 2008 | No Comments
The Beet Organic Café & Market is housed in an old TD Bank building, its entrance behind a still-functional Green Machine ABM terminal. I’m not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or a subtle, “only in the Junction” political statement: on Queen West, the big brands are taking over the mom & pop restaurants and stores. In Toronto’s “up and coming” West End, it’s apparently the other way around.
The Beet is not vegetarian, but very vegetarian and vegan friendly. All of its food is organic and healthily prepared. The fact that it’s co-owned by a certified nutritionist and a homeopathic doctor is evident in everything we tried: the food is tasty, healthy and solid. Unlike the light-and-fluffy salads that pass for vegetarian fare elsewhere, things here are weighty and feel like they’re providing actual nutrition.
It’s all very earnest, but excellent and deserving of a vegan’s/vegetarian’s/locavore’s/eco-aware person’s patronage. The “market” is a thoughtful selection of healthy products, from organic toothpaste to healthy granola bars to tea (the selection could be a little better here, I think…) and coffee. The soundtrack was tasty and chilled roots reggae today, perhaps indicating the preferences of the fabulously friendly blonde dreadlocked server.
We ordered the soup of the day (cream of parsnip with apple), the frittata of the day (kale, broccoli, Emmenthal), a tofu and avocado wrap and a freshly juiced juice. Everything was delicious, the soup a particular standout for me. The sandwich/frittata plates are served with a substantial helping of well-dressed salad (a rare feat, finding a well-dressed salad in any restaurant) and solid multigrain bread with sundried tomato spread.
I ordered jasmine green tea which came in a Bodum coffee plunger – a good idea in principle, but the plunger was a little loose, so I had a few moments of, “Oh boy, I hope it holds up!” :) I did get a free top-up of hot water though (without asking!), which was great.
The bathroom is fabulous (I imagine it used to be the bank manager’s office – worth checking out for its sheer size alone, but also very clean and new, and furnished with non-scented hand soap, which is a rarity again).
Overall, highly recommended. You can tell that intelligent human beings are involved in planning and running this restaurant daily. It felt like a bit of an oasis, and I think I’ll return many times. And I sincerely hope it does well. Toronto needs more restaurants like this.
Closed Mondays, Open Tuesday through Sunday. Hours and location on the website.
Tags: food > restaurants > reviews > toronto > vegetarian
Toronto Brickworks
Posted on | November 2, 2008 | No Comments
The Don Valley Brick Works consists of 16 heritage buildings and an adjacent 16-hectaire public park that includes the Weston Quarry Garden, wetlands, hiking trails, and wildflower meadows. From 1889 to 1984, the site was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards. The Don Valley Pressed Brick Works Company produced a wide variety of bricks and kiln-fired clay products that built much of Toronto’s heritage buildings and many of Canada’s national landmarks including Winnipeg’s T. Eaton Building, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Casa Loma, Montreal’s Acadia Apartments and Moncton’s T. Eaton Building. (From: http://www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/)
Pictures from a weekend outing. I had to shoot around all the Japanese tourists and their tripods. Clearly, it’s a hot tip for tourists.
Where food and water come from
Posted on | February 10, 2008 | No Comments
There’s a great article about a speech David Suzuki – environmentalist, scientist, activist – gave at McGill University in The McGill Daily.
He described speaking to children in Toronto who could not explain where water or food came from, only that it was supplied by the economy.
Our deep disconnection from the environment, and increasingly our inability to establish even theoretical connections between the soil, plants and animals in our food chain and ourselves, is maddening and sad. Especially urban children, in the developed and developing world, have no idea where food comes from.
Increasingly – as Michael Pollan elegantly argues – food also isn’t food anymore. Most items we buy from supermarkets are industrially assembled from component ingredients (most of which are based on corn), containing chemical compounds that we wouldn’t recognize as ‘food’ if we were to examine them individually.
So it’s understandable that children don’t understand where food comes from. Adults don’t either. We are deeply confused and uncertain about the world we live in:
Suzuki also underlined the interconnectedness of humans with their natural world – a point not often made by mainstream environment critics. “We are the environment. There is no distinction. What we do to the earth we do to ourselves,” he said.
Roxy Paine sculptures in Madison Square Park
Posted on | December 18, 2007 | No Comments
I was in New York in October and ran into these sculptures in Madison Square Park. They’re quite beautiful: life-sized shiny metal trees that oddly blend into the surroundings. I had no idea they were there… it had been one of those long walking days in the city and I sat down on a bench on the North side of the park to give my tired legs a rest.
Through the trees I saw something shiny, so I decided to check it out. It was an interesting moment – ‘discovering’ these sculptures quite innocently, and being genuinely surprised to find them. I wonder if that was the artist’s intention.
The work is called ‘Conjoined’ (one of three – the others are another, bigger tree, and a pile of rocks) and will be there until the end of December, 2007. Although I can’t imagine that it’s as nice in the middle of winter as it is in my picture. Link to the park’s site here.
A new kind of tree house
Posted on | December 17, 2007 | No Comments
I just saw an interesting piece on Deutsche Welle TV. Researchers at the Institute for the Foundations of Architecture at the University of Stuttgart in Germany have successfully built a rudimentary building using live trees and other materials. Dubbed ‘Baubotanik‘ (‘Building Botany’), the idea is to exploit the natural characteristics (including growth) of living plants in conjunction with regular building materials in order to create a new kind of building.
So far, the group from Stuttgart has created a free standing bridge in 2005 (‘Steg’), and a birding observation tower in 2007 (‘Vogelguckhaus’). Pictures can be seen at their home page or on DW TV’s video on demand (German only).
I think this is very evocative and constitutes an interesting type of future construction, especially in areas where a low ecological footprint is required, such as nature reserves, zoos or botanical gardens. I was especially impressed by the idea that these would be ‘self-repairing’ constructs – hurt trees can heal themselves, compensating for any harm by growing around it.
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
