The fairness fallacy (a transit story)

Scarborough Councillor
Michelle Berardinetti, we must fight.
(Photo from her website)

It's taken me more than a decade of living in Toronto to feel a real vested interest in local politics. Watching the city elect a guy like Rob Ford as mayor will do that to you. I've not really kept my feelings for the mayor's policies a secret, and since I'm in the middle of trying out a dozen different directions for this blog, I might as well lob an angry rant about politics. I didn't want to write a "hey, I dislike Rob Ford" blog post. Not only has it been done, it's been done by people who have way more practice than I do.


Recently one of the city's suburban councillors by the name of Michelle Berardinetti took to Twitter to pontificate on recent attempts to reopen debate on a major rapid transit initiative known as Transit City. It consisted of a network of light rapid transit (LRT) rail-based lines, starting with Phase 1's Finch, Eglinton, Sheppard and Scarborough lines (the latter a one-for-one replacement for an existing RT rail line).

The four pieces of pre-Fordian Transit City.
Source: TTC.ca

Rob Ford declared on his first day in office that Transit City was dead. People did not want glorified streetcars, he said, so he asked the province to rip up its plans for the first phase of Transit City and use the money to complete the Scarborough LRT line and, significantly, bury the Eglinton line from end to end. Transit City had already called for the line to be buried through the centre of the city, emerging as a surface route on the east end at Laird Drive (which you'll find marked on the orange line above) and continuing through to Kennedy. What was so puzzling about this decision was that there was no reason to do it. What was so infuriating about this decision was that it would come at the expense of the Finch and Sheppard lines.

That didn't sit well with many folks, but it didn't seem like there was much anyone could do about it in a Ford-controlled city council until that same council shot down some fairly significant service cuts to the relative surprise of many. All of a sudden, the door was open to taking another look at the dismissal of Transit City.

This is where Michelle Berardinetti - and my indignation - comes in. She made some eye-opening comments on Twitter this week on why we should just accept the mayor's unilateral cancellation of the plan in favour of paying to bury the Eglinton line through the suburbs.

Heard LRT will stop every 300m between streets forcing Scarborough residents to walk to bus stops. Also exposed to elements.
@CouncillorMB on Twitter

Let me just start by saying that I think it behooves a city councillor to make major (read: multibillion-dollar) policy decisions based on reliable sources, not just what you "heard" somewhere. What really caught my eye, though, was the point about being exposed to the elements. Is she really suggesting that we should spend an extra $2-billion to bury the full length of the line just so people don't have to stand outside to catch the LRT? Apparently yes.

Movie: Submarine

Eddie Marsan isn't in this movie,
but don't worry, I'll explain.
(Photo from gdcgraphics on Flickr)

This is the kind of movie where you know what you're going to get right from the very beginning, but sometimes that kind of movie just works. Sure, it's simple, but it's also sweet. I was already fairly predisposed to liking it, knowing it was directed by Richard Ayoade, whom I knew only from the IT Crowd.


And honestly, it was just so nice to see Sally Hawkins in another film after spending all of Happy-Go-Lucky hating her "Poppy" character so much I was contemplating stabbing out my own eyes with the straw from my drink. She doesn't do anything special in Submarine but her scenes with Noah Taylor form an entertaining subplot.

And while we're on the subject of Happy-Go-Lucky, I would really be interested in seeing a short film made up of just the drivers' ed scenes from that movie. Eddie Marsan was just so perfect in that it almost redeemed the whole movie, kind of like how Christoph Waltz's scenes in Inglourious Basterds were the only ones worth watching.

So there you have it, my thoughts on a movie that are pretty much entirely about movies and a TV show other than the one I was supposed to be talking about. I wish I had a dog; then I could write about that too!

Movie: Midnight in Paris

Recognize this? You should,
because the movie starts
with hours of this stuff.
(Photo from wlappe on Flickr)

And the Oscar for longest, most annoyingly monotonous B-roll intro goes to...

I actually quite enjoyed this film. It has to be one of Woody Allen's most accessible stories and I liked the escapist narrative. It's a lot easier to identify with the characters compared to, say Vicky Christina Barcelona, where I hated pretty much everyone in the movie. My biggest complaint, which on the whole is really a very small complaint, is that I felt pretty dumb every time I missed an obvious literary or cultural reference. And they are all obvious. You know when you are missing the joke.

A central theme is that everyone romanticizes some past time period as the golden age. So no matter how much you idealize a particular point in the past, people who lived then thought some even more previous time was better. I find this intriguing because I really don't idealize any of the past. As a society, I don't have any romantic notions of those days when cholera was a big deal, or when we didn't have the internet, or routine bathing.

On a personal level I don't think back fondly at any of my past as being better than what I have now. I suppose you could chalk that up to having an amazingly fortunate life, one that keeps getting better all the time, but so many people I know really do think of their childhood or high school or university as the best times of their lives. I look back on who I was and what I was doing for pretty much every phase of my life up to being married and having kids with total body-shaking cringes. So self-absorbed! So awkward! So unsocialized!

It's know that just because you idealize a previous part of your life doesn't mean you want to go back to that time. But in my case, I'd "rather just forget" all of it. Wipe the slate clean and pretend it never happened. So for me, the here and now is the golden age.

ps I had totally forgotten Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams had been in Wedding Crashers together.

What I Do

Old-timey photo of old-timey
Globe entrance
(photo by me!)

It's getting harder and harder to explain to people exactly what I do. Professionally speaking, anyway. I work for a newspaper, but these days newspapers aren't quite the simple operation they've always been, and besides, my employer had already found a way to make publishing just a newspaper pretty complicated long before it opened the can of worms of digital publishing.

There was a time I could simply say I was an editor, or that I designed pages. But after a few years with the company I managed to start using my derelict computer science skills to start contributing to the newsroom publishing system that we use - that's the software that reporters use to write their stories, designers use to build printed pages, and editors use to publish the website.

After another few years, my work on the system became less of a sideshow and more my main purpose in being there. In 2010, after 10 years with the company, I officially stopped having any hand in editing content or contributing to my company's actual products and transitioned into full time support for the computer system.

So what exactly does that mean?

Movie: The Debt

I really don't know what I'm going to do with this blog, so I'll start with something that I've tried in the past: putting down thoughts on the movies I see. I tried using the Flixster app on Facebook for this a few years ago - in fact I managed to write a review of every film I saw in theatres for quite a long time. But the arrival of a certain someone in my life really slowed down my moviegoing habits and then we had two certain someones and I know that's just not going to happen. So most of these movie posts are going to be about the movies I saw over the Christmas break. It was a bumper crop this year: The Debt, Submarine, Margin Call, The Trip, Midnight in Paris and Crazy Stupid Love.

(If people blathering on about movies isn't your thing, don't worry, I've got other things in mind for this space.)

Does this woman look like she could
take down a guy in a fight?
(from Helen Mirren News on Flickr)

A lot of times I will watch a movie and think "the idea for this story is fantastic but they are really screwing it up." I can't quite put my finger on why I thought The Debt was misplayed. The underlying story is actually pretty powerful stuff: regret, revisionist personal histories, retribution. And the performances are pretty good, too. But something was missing and I can't put my finger on it.

Maybe it's that there's just too much going on. There's a love story subplot (more on that in a second) that seems almost like an afterthought, not to mention the stretching a little too far of credulity with an action sequence featuring Helen Mirren. She's a great actor but she's no spring chicken.

And can I just make one really catty remark with regards to a plot point that I'd say is probably a spoiler? Let's put it after the break just in case you don't want to know.

Now or never

2011 saw the end of cyberpeasant.com. Well, not the end. It's now in some kind of stasis. I ran out of online storage for more photos, and a bunch of things went wrong with email serving (thanks for nothing DotEasy - which is fair, since that's what I was paying them).

I am planning to move both cyberpeasant.com and mckie.ca over to another host in 2012. I've got quite a few changes in mind, with one of the things being a blog. Why a blog? Because "notes" on Facebook are too textual, and tweets are too short for some of the more verbose sarcasm that I like to produce. And if I'm going to start a blog some time in 2012, why not do it Jan 1?

Everyone I know with a blog faces two problems: no idea what to say, and a crushing lack of motivation, especially after the first few weeks or months. I expect this will be no different.

Let's do this, 2012.