[META] On the averted photo drought

Yesterday morning before church I managed to lose my digital camera at a quite pleasant WiFi-enabled coffee shop. (I'm typing this while I'm here, actually while I'm sitting down in the same seat that I was in when last I had my camera.) I'm not looking forward to the expenditures necessary for the camera, but I've had a couple of offers from friends to let me borrow their cameras in the interim. Don't worry: I still have more than enough photos, on my Flickr page and on my laptop, to support the morning and weekend photo posts for a long while.

It's only now that I've really gotten what Nan Goldin meant when she said that her camera was an extension of her, her portable recording and storage device. Sitting here, even without wanting to use the camera--without even wanting to use the webcam!--I feel awkward, like I'm forgotting something. (Would that I'd remembered that before I left here yesterday.) Camera aside, I'm as peeved with the 88 photos I'd failed to download before I lost it. I know that I'll be able to restage the most important photos, and I think that I can restage most of them. There are things, like flowers blooming, that will be lost, or at least will be until next year, but I think I'm fine with that. Last Saturday evening, I was walking home at around 8 o'clock, and the dimming of the increasingly red-shifted light through the post-rain haze was beautiful, and even without a camera I enjoyed it. I'm just a bit sad that I couldn't share that moment, and won't be able to share other moments, with you.

[PHOTO] The last two?

The last two?
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

These two phone booths, located on the east side of Bathurst Street between Bloor and Bathurst, are the only two I've seen that are located anywhere near my neighbourhood, and one of only a handful that I've seen in Toronto.

Will future generations even know what a phone booth was?

[DM] "On the aging of Shanghai's population"

I've a post up at demography Matters exploring the rapid demographic transition in Shanghai, which has been experiencing net natural decrease since 1993, and the potential role that migration can (or cannot) play in mitigating this aging.

[LINK] "The crazy police suspicion of photographers"

Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram links to a rather remarkable incident in the United Kingdom. Some policemen, it seems, don't like photographers taking photographs.

Turner gives a full account of being stopped by two men in Chatham High Street, after he took a picture of a fish bar called Mick's Plaice, which stands between Specsavers and a shop called Mr Flower and advertises jacket potatoes and an all day breakfast in a colour scheme of bold blue and white. The men said they worked for Medway Council.

"I saw a badge attached to one of the men's waistband and saw the logo of Kent Police. The men asked me why I was taking pictures in the High Street.

I told them photography was a hobby and explained what and who I had taken pictures of and why".

Turner continues, "I asked them under what authority they were making their request. They did not provide a clear answer to this question in that they failed to state the legal authority under which they were making their enquiries."

Because they neither stated their authority nor properly identified themselves, Turner refused to answer their questions. The men summoned uniformed police. Turner took photographs of two officers as they approached him reproduced with blurred faces on his blog – and arrest followed. He was handcuffed held in police van and then questioned by two plain clothes officers. "They spoke about the threat of terrorism. They were keen to seek my agreement with regards to the views they expressed, both about the threat of terrorism and the suspicious nature of people with cameras and especially those who chose not to provide identifying details about themselves when requested to do so."

He was searched while still handcuffed. The officer told him to take off his trainers and patted down the soles of his feet. At some point the officers made a veiled threat about Turner's ability to continue as photographer.

As Bertram notes, alienating the sort of people who regularly keep track of what's going on in their environment isn't very sensible. The comments then veer off in several interesting directions, discussing British law and the sorts of people attracted to policing, among other subjects.

[LINK] Four Toronto Star links

• Nicole Baute reports that "Portuguese bull runs becoming an Ontario fixture", with Portuguese-Canadians bringing (bloodless) Portuguese-style bullfighting to rural areas outside of Toronto, these areas then attracting visitors from Toronto proper.


• David Olive comments on how what looks like Ericsson's successful purchase of the core elements of once-successful Canadian telecommunications giant Nortel is a spectacularly good bargain for Ericsson.


• Finally, Christopher Hume raves positively about the successful remodeling of the Bloor-Gladstone Library, and suggests that making the site of the failed Bazis condo tower at Yonge and Bloor a public square would be a good idea likely never to be realized.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Some thoughts on animal rights

I found this article difficult to read.

Shortly before 8 a.m. on a recent weekday morning a no-nonsense woman from the local food industry pulled up in a truck with one of her staff, determined to get quality for money.

When a vendor reached into a metal cage with his iron vice-grips and seized one cat by the throat, she waved him off:

"Not that one, it's too lean."

The vendor released his grip and let the cat drop.

Another was chosen and promptly wrenched from the cage, swooped through the air and – with the handler using one hand to grip it firmly by the tail – stuffed through a tiny hole into a fine-wired carton already crowded with cats.

Each cat had tried to make one last lunge to break free as it was being yanked from the cage – but to no avail.

The idea of eating cat meat, apparently particularly common in Cantonese-speaking areas, appalls me. Mass protests against cat-eating in China, besides signalling the growth of a vibrant civil society, seem entirely justified to me. Eating cats? There are things more disgusting, but still.

As people note in the comments to that post, in the West there are plenty of animals which suffer greatly before being killed for their meat. Take the factory farming system, say. I find the argument that one can't oppose a specific wrong unless one opposes specifically all like wrongs specious, just another way to delegitimize opposition to something morally objectionable by making the very idea of moral objection impossible. Supporters of the seal hunt frequently repeat this logic as well.

There is something to be said for the idea that all found animals share common interests. On the Toronto subway system, chooseveg.ca has been sponsoring a series of ads, contrasting pictures of pairs of animals--a dog and a calf, a cat and a chick--while listing information below the mirror-image pictures of how the food animals are actually quite smart and socially, with horribly images from factory farms filling the bottom of the poster along with ads imploring readers to be vegetarian.

In J.M. Coetzee's provocative The Lives of Animals (available here at Google Books), the protagonist Elizabeth Costello expressed her fears that human beings are inflicting a terrible ongoing holocaust on the animals of the world. I wonder if Costello is right; I wonder if I should become vegetarian.

Thoughts?