John van Gurp

Men are tough, right? We cut ourselves - no big deal. We get insulted at work - laugh and ignore the bozo. A pal tries to pick a fight while out a little too late some night - who cares - it was the beer talking and you’re still pals. We don’t go looking for issues in relationships. We bond with each other over lawnmower repairs, a crappy golf game and how many donairs we ate last year - the most basic and simple things - no complications. A parent dies - we’re philosophical about it. Our daughter leaves home for university in another city - we cry. WE WHAT???!!!

Yes indeed my dear friends… a tear was shed last night while yours truly was alone at his camp to do some carpentry. It came right outta the blue and shocked me to the point that I came home a day early. Me cry? Good lord it must be a virus or something right? Maybe mental illness.

The situation is simple. My daughter, the eldest of two is leaving home in three days to go to university in Montreal. She’ll be moving into an apartment with her boyfriend. She loves Montreal, the BF is a terrific person, her university is one of the best, she will have a few friends there and she has an uncle and aunt a few streets away to keep an eye out and act as surrogate parents. What a great situation for a young person and what parent could have any complaints about how this is turning out?

Why then the angst? I don’t know - maybe it’s common, maybe not, but for me it’s very real and, hopefully short lived as we see her adjust and adapt and use her resourcefulness to build a new life.

We have a social duty and a duty as parents to encourage our young to leave the nest. Children need to be supported in making life-decisions that are not be under the full supervision of the parental safety net. The protective nature of the father-daughter relationship cannot survive once the child is ready and capable of living separately. The protection of parenting must be relaxed and it must pass control over to the child as they become a fully self-sufficient adult. It’s hard to do though; the bedroom of their youth is empty, the secret rituals are stilled, and the family unit altered forever.

It’s a change cycle and maybe the fact it signals parental aging or a major life stage drawing to a close makes it tied to the unexpected emotional response of yours truly. It’s not like getting a new car, or moving to another house. The team is smaller, the parent feels almost superfluous. The baby doesn’t need you any more and you fear diminished love.

Trying to put this in perspective seems to help. I think of all the divorce situations, the families where a shortage of money is a daily issue, or where serious or terminal illness strains every resource or where a parent has died. I face none of these things, my life is charmed in every way. My kids seem perfect, and this transition is the most natural and normal thing we could experience at this stage. So maybe I’ll just be tough about it. I must have a speck of dust in my eye though, so toughness will have to wait a minute.

Have you seen what’s taking place on Chebucto Road now that the headlines have stopped and the protests are a memory? It must be a pure horror-show for anyone living in that stretch across from St. Agnes Church. I just can’t imagine what it muct be like. Crews are digging with heavy machinery more or less right on these people’s doorsteps.

Could this be tested in Halifax at the Liquor Dome?

Calgary club owner ordered to stop scanning patrons’ driver’s licences
Sean Myers
Calgary Herald

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
CALGARY - A Calgary night club owner is vowing to appeal a decision to stop the practice of scanning the driver’s licences of patrons as they walk in the door.

Alberta privacy commissioner Frank Work ordered Tantra Nightclub and its parent company Penny Lane Entertainment to stop scanning licences and to destroy any information that has been collected.

Penny Lane owner Paul Vickers said he has spent millions of dollars installing the scanning equipment in his Calgary and Edmonton venues and they’ve proven to reduce criminal activity in his clubs.

“This is one of the things that keeps the bad guys out,” said Vickers. “Our sole purpose in scanning is the protection of our staff, patrons and property.

“I’m not going to sit idly by on this.”

In his order, Work wrote that at best, Penny Lane “offers conjecture that collecting driver’s license information of patrons may act as a deterrent to violent behavior.”

He said Penny Lane failed to offer any evidence to back up its claims that Tantra was made safer by the scanning practice.

The original complaint was made in 2005 by a University of Calgary law student.

After Penny Lane chose not to comply with a voluntary request to stop scanning, the matter went before the privacy commissioner for a binding decision.

The ruling is binding only on Penny Lane and Vickers has 50 days to appeal.

On my slither to work a couple of weeks ago I saw a small Ziploc baggie duct taped around the dangling cable of a broken down old payphone… Can you guess where it is?The message visible through the plastic was

“In case of poetic emergency break seal - write / draw / express”

…and there was a piece of paper and a little golf-style pencil inside. I chuckled and felt good that someone had done this, but I just carried on to the cubicle farm without acting.

Today as I passed I saw it was still there! So instead of passing by I broke the seal and left a poem and it felt good. It seemed like protection from the approaching day in its sealed office with emails and papers and photocopies and the various annoyances that seem extra obvious on a Monday morning. Even better was seeing on my way home that someone else left words! Very cool.

Over my many years of walking around the city I’ve seen many similar street art projects and wondered about who and why, and what it means. Was it done while laughing? Is it a subversion of mainstream art? Is it a repurposing and replatforming of corporate or municipal infrastructure? The phone was broken after all; why not turn it into a frame for this piece of interactive public art? Reclaim it and change it from a piece of useless junk into a place to express yourself.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry for Street Art

I might make a little sketch tomorrow. Hope you can find it and make your own contribution.

Cheers,
John

A few months ago this was a cesspool of green sludge. Look at it now!

I was out walking in the balmy 6 degree and sunny weather at lunch today (balmy for the beginning of January in Halifax anyway), and was astounded at the condition of Halifax Harbour. It’s amazingly clear.

Never before have I seen such clean water in the harbour. It’s apparent and obvious all along the boardwalk, but most especially apparent and obvious near the wave sculpture, where for so many years an almost opaque green sludge spewed forth from submerged concrete pipes, and various flushed flotsam and jetsom (and then-some) disgorged from the most filty-of-filthys, the Halifax sewer “system”.

Now, you can look down at that exact same spot and count individual starfish and urchins. The ducks dabble and you don’t feel so sorry for them. There’s a clear sparkle to the waves as they lap at the muscle and barnacle encrusted rocks.

At some spots you can make out interesting features. There are old mounds of ballast marking the graves of important warves of the days of sail. I imagine around these mounds are probably all sorts of things lost overboard, or tossed by stevedores and dock workers. So many ships have come and gone with the tides in Halifax Harbour. It was a major port for commerce and military activity. Ships came from all over the world to unload trade goods from far off places, and to take on board lumber, fish, furs and various other items.

There must be cannon and shot and articles from broken barrels; the main shipping container of the past.

We came across an old bicycle someone had pulled up. It was rusted to bits and broken where soft metal had corroded to nothing, but a couple of stainless steel nuts were like new and there was still air in the front tire.

What will summer be like now? It will surely smell better. Will we see sea life at wharf edge? Will seals swim about? Some friends speculate that the water is less attractive now to marine life due to the loss of nutrients. Nutrients? Yuck! I don’t think the previous centuries of sewer and other waste would have held any attraction to marine animals. Will the Sackville River salmon population rebound? Wouldn’t that be cool.

I’ll be posting follow up articles from time to time and welcome your comments as well. Go check it out of you can.

Cheers,
John

Originally posted in my Halifax Herald MyConnect blog

“Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”

The current buzz is that the Owners of The Dome, a nightclub in Halifax recently shut down for a few days by regulators after a large brawl in which 38 people were arrested, and where a week earlier a door security staff allegedly assaulted a patron resulting in serious head trauma, intend make a series of changes to their operations including doubling the number of surveillance cameras.

The owner of The Dome says that the Halifax Police will be able to monitor the CCTV video feed (presumably online from police headquarters).

Is this a first in Canada? It’s probably commonplace in our prisons, but are there other bars in Canada with live police monitoring?

The Dome property has been one of the most heavily CCTV surveilled spots in Halifax for several years. The building’s exterior bristles with cameras at each corner and at entrances and other spots. The entire public space around the property is covered.

(Next door at the World Trade Center, the Halifax Police have a permanent pan, tilt and zoom camera mounted in a plastic bubble conveniently located to be able to watch the many bar areas and also the Grand Parade, where citizens often hold peace rallies, etc.)

No one regulates this. No regulatory agency has authority to say whether or not a private company can keep a public area under surveillance with privately owned video surveillance systems.

Over the past few years the situation seemed to have set a precedent. It led the way as other businesses followed suit. Although none look quite as fortress-like, many have similarly blanketed the public space surrounding their property with private surveillance systems.

The public quietly accepted this proliferation of private surveillance and as a result, and after the murder of Damon Crooks in 2006 outside a downtown bar, the Halifax Police Service was able to install their own real-time CCTV systems throughout the downtown with little public discussion of the privacy implications. You can see them at Pizza Corner, above Neptune Theater and on either side of Summit Place on the waterfront, high up on the top floor. There are several others as well and likely many more to come.

In Chicago the Police operate cameras that raise an alert when someone “lingers” outside a public building. Imagine that… Is Halifax on this track?

Unless the public takes an interest in challenging the currently unchallenged proliferation of electronic surveillance systems we will soon resemble a police state. Will crime rates drop? Probably not, but we are sure to feel the chilling effect of Big Brother watching in case you “linger”.

Now that the Dome is establishing a new precedent with the Halifax police, by allowing real time video surveillance of their customers, how long will it be before this becomes the standard in other clubs?

As some people say, if you’re not doing anything wrong you should have nothing to be concerned about. OK if that’s the case let’s have police cameras in all stores. How about in schools, libraries and restaurants; hotels, sports fields and beaches?

Heck, let’s just get it over with and implant every newborn with a GPS locator chip at birth for real-time tracking of your movements.

How much of this is appropriate for public safety and how much is simply to facilitate convenience for police and profit making by a private business owner? Where does public safety override our rights to privacy and our right to limit police control over law abiding citizens.

“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.”

~ Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. blog

It’s time the provincial government enacted some legislation governing the deployment and use of CCTV in public places.

 http://myconnect.ca/read/80/27767/27767#msg-27767

Dear Bar Owner,

Cut the TV already wouldya please?

I came to your bar to sit with friends and have a meal and a couple of drinks. I’m spending a fair bit of coin in your establishment so I can enjoy their company. We want to talk and laugh and joke around. We want to catch up on old times. We want to enjoy the atmosphere of a bar and the way good friends can draw together in a social setting.

If I wanted to watch TV I would have stayed home. It’s truly horrible and tacky and makes me want to not come to your place again. You’re seriously damaging that which you work so hard to market; the atmosphere and the ambiance that I will pay to enjoy.

Your TVs are all over the place, often tuned to different channels, bombarding your valuable customers with distracting and annoying visual noise. Why do we have to suffer through compulsory television? Who asked for it?

Give me a great beer list, give me tasty bar food, let me laugh at your staff’s witty jokes. I want to love coming to your place and I will spend all kinds of money there but if you pollute my evening with TVs I’ll go somewhere else.

Meanwhile I will be making full use of this handy gadget.

“Mitch Altman, the 50-year-old inventor of the TV-B-Gone, (says) that when he feels depressed he arms himself and heads into the streets. “It’s almost a compulsion for me. When I see a TV going in a public place, I go out of my way to turn it off,” he says.

“Imagine a room where there’s an uptight person wearing really bright clothing and jumping up and down and yelling. It’s hard to be relaxed when that person is present. When a TV goes off, I notice people’s shoulders and arms relax — the body language changes completely. When I’m feeling blue, I turn off a television or two and life just seems a whole lot better.”

Also posted at the Chronicle Herald myConnect site

Well that was interesting.

Last night I attended the Celebration of New Ministry with The People of the Diocese and Susan Elizabeth Moxley Fifteenth Bishop of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Wait did I say “attended”? Aw heck, I participated in it as an actual performer. It was quite neato and very interesting indeed.
I don’t get to many church services, so to have participated in this one was to have attended in real style. To be more specific, I play in a Brazilian style samba band that lead a procession into the church at the beginning of the ceremony. I am quite sure that is a first for the Anglican Cathedral Church of All Saints in Halifax, seat of the Anglican Bishop of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward.

The service was full of traditional ceremony and pagentry, which fascinated me. The clergy and church officials wore white and red. There were robes and tall red hats and brocade and various wooden and metal rods and staffs. There were Acolytes, Vergers, Deacons, Subdeacons, Chaplains, Celebrants, Directors, Chancellors, Archdeaconry representatives, Priests and of course Bishop Moxley herself. Her Honour Lieutenant Governor Mayann Francis was in attendance as well.

It was a mix of solmnity and also of smiles and a sense of joy. Bishop Moxley made comments about social justice and working to fight poverty, both of which sound a note with me.

Anyway, just thought I would share a little bit about my Friday evening.
Cheers,
John

It’s that time of year again. The students are back. I love pretty much everthing about it! We shop at the Quinpool Center and it’s a hotbed for the big community of young people who migrate from all corners of the globe to attend our universities. We see them trying to re-create the comfort food Mom used to make, picking through the meager bokchoi pile or looking for some tabbouleh that has the right colour.

Read the rest or leave comments on my Halifax Herald blog