The Victoria news

I made it to Vancouver without any mechanical breakdowns or conflagrations, and my hotel was only three blocks from where the ferry bus dropped us off, so getting here was blessedly painless.

The Canadian Rockies tour I'm taking doesn't begin until Monday, and we leave Vancouver early Tuesday morning, so I wanted to have a few nights here first to see the city. It's gray and drizzly and all I've seen so far are some typical big city streets of stores and office buildings, with some cloudy mountains glowering in the distance. It's supposed to rain all day tomorrow, so I may not see much more then, but if I'm forced to spend an afternoon in my hotel room going through pictures from Victoria, I probably won't mind that much.

I've been lucky enough to stay at some very nice hotels, but I have never seen anything quite like the bathtub taking up an entire corner of my hotel room here. I also have a balcony. And a bar. Not a minibar, but an actual bar, complete with barstools. And while I was typing this, someone knocked at my door and delivered bottled water and warm cookies. Which I haven't eaten yet, because I'm full from the box of chocolates that was waiting for me.

Before I fall into a chocolate coma I do want to write a little bit more about Victoria. One of the great pleasures of being there was the local newspaper (the Victoria Times Colonist) which I read over breakfast every morning. I haven't quite managed to ignore the U.S. news entirely, but having the Times Colonist there made it much easier.

For example, the two headlines on the front page this morning were Orcas return after 8-week no-show and Intruders found living in Saanich RVs; two arrested.

Police responding to a call from the family arrived and found the camper door shut. When they tried to open it, it was being held closed. Police said the man inside eventually opened the door, likely persuaded by the barking of police dog Hitch.

Well done, Hitch! I realize that this incident was probably very scary for the family involved, but after years of non-stop crimes and catastrophes in the American media, a story where everything ends peaceably and the dog involved actually gets credit seems downright charming, and a reminder that there are still sane places in this world.

News of the world

I've barely been keeping up with local news recently and haven't spent much time cruising the online news reports. But here's an interesting story from Afghanistan, with yet another in a long series of unintended consequences: the government has banned ammonium nitrate fertilizer because it can be used to make explosives, perhaps not taking sufficiently into account the fact that it is also used as...fertilizer.

Nur Agha, from the village of Adazai, said, “When I was using ammonium nitrate, I was selling 420 kilograms of dried prunes a year. Last year, after the fertiliser was banned, I harvested just 70 kilograms of plums as the fruit dropped before it was ripe.”

The farmer said he now believed Afghanistan’s international allies “want us to lose our livelihoods and be forced to go to war”.

Eight out of ten Afghans are involved in agriculture or animal husbandry, but chronic underdevelopment and years of war mean the farming sector is always on the edge. Even when ammonium nitrate was allowed, growing crops was an arduous task based on manual labour, and farmers were lucky to make a subsistence living.

A local elder in Tagab who did not want to be named said the plum trees in his orchard had yellowing leaves and dropped their fruit prematurely. He compared the fertiliser ban to the outlawing of opium production – in both cases the authorities had failed to come up with a workable alternative.

“We’re fed up with orders from the government. One day, they tell us not to grow poppy as it’s harmful to their foreign friends. The next, they tell us not to use this [fertiliser], again because it harms their foreign friends,” he said. “Promises of assistance haven’t been delivered on…. I am left with an orchard that isn’t productive because there’s no ammonium nitrate since the government ban, and there is no alternative fertiliser.”

That's in the Bible. Or the Constitution.

The Bismarck Tribune has an article on the First Amendment Free Food Festival celebrating Constitution Day at Bismarck State College. Students could have all the pizza they wanted as long as they gave up their first amendment rights, including, apparently freedom to lunch. "As students entered, they were given pizza, but they weren’t necessarily given the kind they wanted. They were given something to drink, but people desiring water invariably received pop and vice versa."

Students Allison Bopp and Sam Harris were among throngs of people enjoying the pizza and lack of freedom. Both said the event taught them an important lesson about the rights they enjoy in this country.

“You don’t know what you have until it’s taken,” Harris said.

“I think that it’ll make me appreciate it for a while,” Bopp said.

Bauer said that was the point of the event — to teach students about the day-to-day freedoms they may take for granted. She said many of the students seemed surprised at what all was included in their freedoms.

As am I. With so many misguided invocations of the Constitution being thrown around these days, I'm mostly shocked that college students don't already have at least a passing familiarity with the First Amendment, and the ability to appreciate freedom of religion and freedom of the press on a slightly more sophisticated level than freedom to choose your pizza toppings. Getting what you want just because you want it is not among the "what all" guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, no matter what the tea partiers seem to think.

News of the world

The Gibraltar Chronicle ("Gibraltar’s newspaper for over two centuries for all the latest Local and National News") has a jaunty, very English tone, with lots of bad punning headlines, but the content consists almost entirely of bitching about Spain and the local officials across the border. They are, however, very pleased with the opening of a new prison, HMP Windmill Hill (which sounds more like a new-age resort than a prison), replacing the "medieval" Moorish Castle Prison (which sounds, well, medieval.)

A gift too that the Moorish Castle is finally free to become the public building it should long have been. There are great opportunities to exploit its lime pit, gallows and other grim assets in a way that both preserves history and improves the educational/tourism product.

Somehow I don't see "Come and see our lime pit!" as a successful slogan for the Gibraltar tourism industry. Even if you throw in the gallows.

News of the world

Reading about the various legislatures of the world does at least make me feel a bit more charitable towards the US Congress. They're awful, but they're not uniquely awful. There is something about getting a group of politicians together in a room with microphones and gavels that guarantees you will not be seeing humanity at its most inspiring.

The Legislative Assembly of the Falkland Islands recently required seven speeches to discuss a motion to adjourn. But they are at least refreshingly civil to one another, which is probably a necessity when you live on a remote group of islands with only a few thousand other people. It's not as though you can avoid running into each other at the supermarket.

But you do have to like any legislature where the speeches begin with "Mr Speaker, Honourable Members, I wish to begin with tall poppies and Mexican Crabs" and go on to this:

Mr Speaker, July was an entertaining month -the World Cup for us football phonetics and also Farmers’ Week. There’s only so much excitement any man can take. This was, of course, my first Farmers’ Week and I’ve nothing to compare it to. All of the sessions were well attended and I sensed an air of optimism and hopes of a bright future for farming. All that we can do as an assembly is to create opportunities. It is now up to others to seize the day; and hats off to all those involved in the setting up of the Falkland Islands’ Meat Company many years ago. It took a fair amount of vision. I said this before – “FIMCO might not be the ‘last chance saloon but there aren’t too many watering holes for farming after this one.”

News of the world

I've always loved newspapers, and one of the first things I do in any new city is buy the local paper, even if I can't understand the language. So naturally one of my Internet pleasures is reading the English-language newspapers around the world. The professional, well-written sites are often the least interesting, just insufferable expatriates spouting off for each other.

The more obscure sites don't just have the charms of mangled English; they also provide interesting and sometimes inadvertent glimpses of the culture. The UB Post in Mongolia, for example, has the usual links at the top of the main page:  Politics. Business. Sports. Entertainment. Mining. Mining? That is apparently very important to Mongolia, which somehow I had never known.

I also love Olloo.mn, the "Mongolian News and Information Leader." Here's one typical story:

The First Democratic President of Mongolia Ts. Elbegdorj is launching a work to get au fait with activities of state institutions.

He is mobilizing all available efforts for establishing justice and he is one of people, who want to change unequal serving law. Thus, the President will be get acquainting with activities of supreme courts in Chingeltei district and Ulaanbaatar at 10.00 am, today.

I couldn't have said it better myself.