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Food • Writing • Poetry

Online marketing… just when you thought your inbox couldn’t take any more – more and more is coming from all directions. And when it’s from the right sources it’s not unwelcome. But it’s still too much. Every new piece of mail nudges another few minutes away from something else I might choose and prefer to do. Increasingly I find the best way to manage my time is to take my laptop and hide in a library where there’s no WiFi.

Even the Poetry Book Society is doing it. And if the emails about the TS Eliot shortlist are not enough, you can go looking for more. Their Online Poetry Readings promises to bring you some excellent poetry.

As I’ve probably said before , I love love love radio. It’s great company for the multitasker. Here are a couple of shows by our own David Suzuki – episodes from his Bottom Line series – about soil. Among others, they feature the hyphenated self-described grass farmer from Virginia, Joel Salatin, who is always entertaining to listen to. Podcasts for Bottom Line Part 3 are Soil: Life in the Dirt followed by Soil: How to Feed the World.

Meanwhile, I’m gearing up to see and hear a live person next week in Vancouver. Urban agriculture giant Will Allen is going to be speaking on the topic Growing Out of Hunger.

We started off the year in a little anxiety. The home for Planet Earth Poetry has been sold – the Black Stilt is in transition to becoming another Moka House – but so far the poets hold sway, and the coffee still flows of a Friday.

Wendy Morton wanted to call our attention to the Solstice Poets feature – the only full page poetry feature in a Canadian newspaper – and offer thanks for its support by departing Times-Colonist editor in chief Lucinda Chodan, who is doing things a little backwards and leaving Victoria for Edmonton.

She was presented with an autographed apron…

After which there followed the open mic

and Patrick Lane introduced the main event, which was a reading by various contributors to the annual Leaf Press anthology of a group who have been meeting with him for retreats for many years.

The January winter market took place at Market Square, luckily missing much of the rain that started falling again in the afternoon.

Terra Nossa proving popular with the meat crowd again

and Sea Bluff Farm attracting a queue for the vegetables.

It’s hard being green, and don’t we all know it? Everything’s so complicated. Local or organic? Paper or biodegradable plastic? On and on.. For some perceptive insights into the advertising angles, catch while you can the Green Marketing podcast on one of CBC‘s very best radio shows: The Art of Persuasion. From Rachel Carson, to BP’s rebranding errors – well in advance of the Deepwater Horizon fiasco, to green pizza, to Marks & Spencer’s Plan A, it’s a good, pithy story well told. And the website now offers visual content, like this fabulous ad:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSrVKVGBAcE?fs=1]

Well. Once you’ve mastered your green strategy you still have to cope with the rest of life’s irritations. It seems sometimes that things go well beyond annoying. For those still looking for a new year’s resolution, might I suggest direct consumer action? It has the double benefit of being a stress reliever for the complainant, and a public education service for the industry in question.

The Consumers Association of Canada provides a most helpful list of agencies to complain to, arranged by industry, as well as tips on complaining effectively.

Those of you not happy to be test dummies for Canadian airport security geeks wanting to play with their new body scanners can vent your spleen at the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.

The Advertising Complaints Authority is the place to go to complain about advertising by email, mail or fax.

Thanks to Mona for passing along this article from the Georgia Straight by the excellent Bill Freeman, one of Canada’s best spokespeople on the topic of copyright, and chair of the Creators’ Copyright Coalition, an organization of 17 of the largest creator groups in the country, representing over 100,000 Canadian creators.

As Freeman says, once things were simple; then along came the internet and that changed everything. And the proposed amendment (Bill C-32) to the Canadian copyright act, which has received second reading and is now before a legislative committee, threatens the livelihood of anyone who hopes to make a living from a creative profession.

It seems that the internet, which started life as a tool for free dissemination of just about everything, is starting to become another floor in the towering edifice of our have/have not society. Wealth is so polarized for so many of us now — and it’s worsening by the day.

Have a listen to CBC Spark‘s recent program on innovation, and particularly to Barbara van Shewick who explains how and why changes to the internet’s architecture will put an end to innovation of the kind that spawned eBay and Facebook. She outlines the kinds of harm that can be done when internet service providers are allowed to limit access to information, and explains why developers of the future will have to have money and power behind them. Gone the days of making a killer app from the comfort and safety of your basement… Oh wait, I never did get the hang of that either…

Happy new year!

I was among the Solstice poets featured in the paper this season, and my poem appeared today. It’s a great series to be part of and the Times-Colonist is to be commended for its boldness in publishing (gasp) poetry.

But… in the online version, my stanza and line breaks were gone (which is part of the problem about ebooks and poetry, by the way), so for the purists, and my fellow “line-making creatures” – as Billy Collins calls us – out there, I give you the poem as it was supposed to look.

Solstice RhonaMcAdam http://d1.scribdassets.com/ScribdViewer.swf