Colossal Opera

The Vancouver Opera season opened officially last Saturday with Puccini's final opera, Turandot. For those who've seen the ads about town, they've been pitching it as Colossal Opera!

As part of my class experience, we went to see the final full dress rehearsal on Thursday night. The best part is that dress rehearsals are only $12, and general admission, so you can sit in truly excellent seats. The seats I and my companions were in would normally have been $87!

In theory, a dress rehearsal can have anything happen; after all, this is a rehearsal and the last chance to iron out any bugs. However, the performance was smooth and uninterrupted.

The big draw for this rendition of Turnadot is the soprano, Audrey Stottler, who has reprised this role many times around the world. She was truly on form and put on a terrific vocal show. The lead tenor was decent, and the staging was splendid. I highly recommend it (and tickets are almost sold out, so don't delay!)

Amarone

Ostensibly, this blog is supposed to be about food and philosophy.

Looking back at my postings of late, I’ve not written about food a lot, so herewith, some overdue food posting!

The nice thing about a great bottle of wine is that you get to talk about it for several weeks before enjoying it. (I don’t pretend to be a wine expert, but I know what I like; I did take the WSET Intermediate program which doesn’t hurt.) I had a bottle of 1997 Amarone that needed a special dinner to go with it, and Thanksgiving two weeks ago was as good an excuse as any to open it up.

My wife and I had invited our good friends J&E, which we had not seen in too long, over for dinner. Since we and they were both having turkey later in the weekend, I looked in my freezer to see what I had available.

Now, it is said that Amarone and Osso Bucco are a marriage made in heaven, so I went for the beef shanks that were in my freezer. There are many great ways of making beef shanks, but I went with a slightly Creole variant to go with basil mashed potatoes and some very simple sautéed vegetables.

Dinner was fabulous. The wine was stellar. 1997 was one of the best years in recent times for Amarone, and this one didn’t disappoint. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to get more of it, seeing as this bottle was purchased two years ago, but if I can find it again, I’ll buy a case.

Musings About the Teacher Strike

The teacher’s strike is now in its second week, and I suspect that it will not be much longer before the public support the teachers currently enjoy will slowly but surely turn against them. The BCTF leadership has unfortunately painted the teachers into a corner and now they can only lose.

The headlines in the Sun have both the labour minister, Mike de Jong, and the head of the BC Business Council saying, respectively, that they will not negotiate while the teachers are engaged in an illegal action, and that the rule of law must prevail or else (in a fine example of hyperbole), anarchy will reign. People forget that social change often comes through technically illegal actions. We don’t have 40 hour work weeks, benefits, and so forth out of the goodness of business owners’ hearts.

The government, no matter their history of legislating away contracts they didn’t like, ignoring “binding” arbitration rulings, and general roughshod approach to negotiations with public sector employees will soon not only still wield the legislative hammer but also public support to use it. As H.L. Mencken said, "democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." It’s like watching a train wreck.

The problem is not the illegality of the strike per se, but rather that other public sector contracts are all due for negotiation and renewal this coming spring. If the government accedes to teacher demands now, then it will set some level of precedent for negotiations to come.

Unfortunately, it’s going to go very badly for the teachers. For all they are right about classroom conditions having deteriorated badly in the past decade, they have resorted to playing a high stakes “all-in” game which they can’t win.

The judge who didn’t fine the union but rather innovatively froze the BCTF assets gave the teachers a graceful out. The teachers could have gone back to work in the classroom and then worked on creative solutions to continue their protest. One very simple way would be to evaluate and mark work and communicate that to the students and the parents but refuse to report it to the administration. This then allows students to learn while putting pressure on the PSEA to come to some kind of accommodation. (Incidentally, this worked exceptionally well for the teaching assistants up at SFU a number of years ago).

They could also work to rule, which means no extracurricular activities for anybody. This might annoy parents enough to have them put pressure on the government to improve working conditions.

The dispute isn’t about money. Yes, they would like a raise. So would you. Show me someone who wouldn’t like and take more money for the work they do; the banal whine that it’s about money is a red herring.

The problem is much more complex than the newspaper headlines would have us believe; the challenge I’m putting to people is to become genuinely informed. Learn what the issues are, and then do something helpful to help get it resolved.

Essential Services

The teachers are still out on strike, and today the court imposed no fine on the BCTF for their "illegal" strike action, but did prevent them from paying strike pay to anyone, nor for third parties (i.e. other labour unions) from doing so. A good primer on the history of teacher-government negotiations in BC since the mid-1980's can be found here.

I put illegal in quotes because I find it disingenuous of the government to simply put forth the rhetoric that the teachers are breaking the law and engaging in illegal activity when they pre-emptively passed legislation (Bill 12) making it so only last Friday; indeed, the passage of Bill 12 precipitated the full scale strike - up until that point, the BCTF had not engaged in strike action (and for the hairsplitters out there, yes they did engage in labour action, but were most definitively not on strike and were only planning on rotating one day strikes down the road).

I got into an interesting debate with a friend of mine here at work about it - she contends that teachers are an essential service. I contend they are not.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

I’m a fan of the funny pages in the newspaper. I keep my subscription to the Vancouver Sun as much for the comics page as I do for anything else they print, and there some days I’m so busy that all I get to read are the comics.

There are many strips I really enjoy: For Better or for Worse; Betty; Monty; Bizarro; Speed Bump; Fisher; Mutts; Dilbert; Adam; Ben; Big Nate; 9 Chickweed Lane. All of those are comics that I read daily; some of them are only available to me online because my papers don’t carry them.

But if there’s one strip that I just adored, it was Calvin and Hobbes.

"Calvin and Hobbes" – named after the 16th century theologian who believed in predestination, and the 17th century philosopher who called human life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" – follows the adventures of a boy with an adult's maturity and penchant for finding mischief. – ABC News

A couple of days ago, I received my copy of The Complete Calvin & Hobbes.

If you’re a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, it’s worth every penny. The books are beautifully bound and printed on nice heavy coated paper; this is the kind of binding and paper you might well expect of those tomes of artworks museums publish – they weigh a ton! This edition is definitely meant for the dedicated fan as a permanent addition to their personal library.

If you're daunted by the price, relax. If you bought every single book, you'd spend more and still not have all the comics. If you have all the books, buy this set anyways.

The first volume includes a preface with the history of the strip and commentary by Bill Watterson, the cartoonist. It was educational reading about his battle with the comic syndicate over the licensing of spin off products like t-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, plush toys, etc. Bill said no to all of that, and I admire him for both his reasons for that and more importantly standing by his principles. Any Calvin and Hobbes merchandise you find is bootleg.

My first adventures with Calvin and Hobbes were as a university student. The strip was funny and enjoyable and really appealing to me on many levels. I particularly enjoyed Calvin’s snowmen and his irrepressible enthusiasm for adventure. Now, a decade after Bill Watterson put down his pens and ended the strip, I’m rediscovering the joy of his humour. As a parent, some of the strips are even more poignant and meaningful, and yes, funny; some have made me laugh so hard, I had tears in my eyes and difficulty breathing.

It’s been like welcoming home an old dear friend that you haven’t seen in too long.

Home Canning?

I’ve been following a series of articles in The Tyee called The Hundred Mile Diet. I’ve enjoyed the articles more as they’ve strayed away from the political soapbox and delved more into the food side of things.

Their latest article talks about canning, and they say the following:

Preparing for a Hundred-Mile winter is like adding a part-time job to our full-time lives. Like most Vancouverites, we're stupidly overscheduled most of the time. Adding hours of gleaning and canning to our days has more than once pushed us into the wee hours of the morning. "Sometime in the winter, this will all pay off," says Alisa like a mantra. "We won't have to buy any food; we won't have to cook any food." In the meantime, though, tempers flare as midnight ticks past and there are still 48 ears of corn to husk, blanch and cut into niblets for freezing.

I can so relate to that comment. The first year I tried my hand at pickles, in my small but very functional apartment kitchen, I was up until past midnight making batch after batch of them – five different kinds in all. My wife laughs about it now, but at the time...

The summer my daughter was born, I was still able to make a lot of stuff. Since then though, I’ve started grad school and have a toddler at home. This summer I’ve made nothing. Not a single jar of jam, no pickles, nothing. Stupidly overscheduled is certainly one way to put it.

Ok, I lied. I did manage to make and jar some applesauce on the weekend because we got some free apples from our friend’s tree; but compared to the cases of jam I made in the summer of 2004, and the several dozen jars of marmalade in January, I’ve done nothing.

We are beginning to realize that a Hundred-Mile Diet doesn't only hint at a more ecologically sustainable way to eat and drink. It also points to a deeper shift – an actual change in life patterns.

I wish them luck in their quixotic enterprise. Let’s see if they apply it to everything else they buy, like clothes, furniture, glassware …

As for me, well, maybe I'll get a chance to make some marmelade after Christmas, but I won't hold my breath. At least the cellar still has lots of the bounty of 2004.

Welcome Back

The CBC has apparently reached an agreement with its employees according to several news sources, and will shortly be back on the air – quite possibly this week.

This is happy news to my ears. As much as CKNW has been entertaining in my morning commute, I’ve missed Radio Canada (the French CBC station).

During the lockout, I’ve heard a lot of commentary, especially by the neo-con business commentator Michael Campbell both on NW and in the Vancouver Sun, about the cost of the CBC to the taxpayer. The wisdom goes something like this: we should spend the roughly $1B we currently allocate to the CBC on programs or tax cuts and let the CBC float free to fight it out with commercial television and radio. At best, they would have the CBC become voluntarily funded entities like PBS and NPR in the United States.

To support this position, they cite polls showing that somewhat over 61% of Canadians don’t care that CBC is in lockout and don’t miss them, whereas only 12% have expressed strong support for the CBC.

However, despite possibly valid arguments that CBC programming caters only to the “eggheads” and “intellectuals” among us, I think the CBC is an important and culturally vital entity. It is the only place which has uniquely Canadian content – this includes a lot of stuff that I freely admit I find tedious or boring or just don’t care about. However, nowhere else will you find shows like CBC radio’s “Ideas”, television series like “Canada: A People’s History”, or shows by and for teenage consumers like “Common Cents”. Incidentally, “Canada: A People’s History”, was an enormous success when it first aired – in terms of ratings, it was absolute king of the Canadian airwaves.

PBS in the US, for all that it has a lot of good programming, doesn’t have anything like this – they have more highbrow fare than you’ll find on the mainstream broadcasters, but they also show an enormous amount of foreign entertainment to get the $$ flowing in. In terms of cultural content though, it doesn’t have anything comparable to the CBC.

The CBC isn’t perfect, but there’s nothing else like it on television or radio. It’s worth keeping.