Gone in 60 Seconds - Earth Hour Edition

A year ago I crafted this:

“Yes I am aware. I am aware of a lot of things, actually. Even things happening outside my country. Even things happening on different continents. Even things happening to people I have no natural cultural or ethnic connection to.

"But what I am most painfully aware of is that your awareness group is not meant to solve a problem. It is designed to use manipulative advertising techniques to create a false promise that your group will deliver anything other than just more awareness.”

Now it's true that awareness is dangerous, in the wrong hands. The cancer fraudster Ashley Kirilow began like a Lou Reed character come to life: She plucked her eyebrows on the way; shaved her head; and then she was a cancer survivor. Till she took a walk with the fraud squad. And all the locals became aware that cancer charity donations were vulnerable to fraud.

In the same vein, it is bloody obvious to all that Earth Hour is a vacuous gesture. But who is Earth Hour for? It's for children. Children. “Let's turn out the lights and play a game in the dark and help save the planet.” Yes it's magical thinking, but that's what children do and we love that in them.

So why does Earth Hour arouse such strong emotion? Yes it's a vulgar and indulgent exercise in greenwashing that property managers have grabbed onto with both hands. Oh, the humanity! But I believe the danger of Earth Hour is that it's social hygiene. By observing Earth Hour, we are indoctrinating our children with positive messages about caring about the health of animals and the natural world.

And when we conspire to make children care, then the National Post's Peter Foster derides "ecofascist nonsense such as Earth Hour". He may be right, but he's also right wing. Not that's there anything wrong with that! So Peter Foster is angry that Earth Hour has no positive benefit, other than to inculcate our children with a caring attitude attitude toward animals and the environment.

But everyone I know cares about animals and the environment. I live in that environment. I eat those animals. And really, what does the World Wildlife Fund do? One day will they flashmob in my laneway and vaccinate all the raccoons?  I doubt it. Based on their website, they are all about “partner programs”. Standard weasel words for “sit on our butts in boardrooms and hold conference calls with green groups. And try to make the governments pay for it all.” Well, good luck with that.

For me Earth Hour will be about going to the park near my house with the classic “million dollar view” of our City's downtown. And when I go there at 8:30 tonight it will be cool to see those buildings all dark.  

Nightmare Dream at Campbell House

Campbell House is an 1822 Palladian Style Georgian residence that represents the height of colonial rule in Canada. Built one decade after the War of 1812 it represented England’s last successful attempt to maintain their Colonial interests in North America.

Nearly two centuries later, 25 patrons crowd into Campbell House`s grand entrance hall, reading their programs and making small talk. Tickets are taken and coats are hung. There are way too many backpacks. The director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu is taking time to meet the audience and share a few words as we await the opening. We are all wondering - "How will we know when Nightmare Dream has started?"

A thunderous crash answers that question. Simon Dube (Peter Bailey) begins descending the spiral Grand staircase, trailing a long train of sheer silk. Dube begins a bureaucratic outline of an African Studies course that degenerates into a hostile dialogue with a group of sophomore students. The spirit of humor of the production is immediately evident. Barking the reading list to the class, Dube rhymes off a long list of important tomes on African cultural and colonial history. All of which are written by writers with clearly European names. Not the wittiest conceit, but one that is necessary to establish the thesis of what will develop into a sprawling work about the post-colonial African Diaspora...

Dube struts down the stairs and disappears. We follow and find ourselves sharing a basement chamber with  Dube, a dancing shaman, and a corpse. The scene is without material dialogue, and consists largely of the shaman dancing around the pallet holding the corpse. The dance is spectacular. Physical. Visceral. Taut. But then anyone who has seen Pulga Muchochoma since he arrived in Canada in 2006 expects no less.

The shaman's dancing is effective, and the corpse begins to move under the shroud. However the dancing shaman has transformed into a spirit animal, and Dube is holding a machete. There is a quick flash of the blade, and the spirit animal has been despatched into another realm.

We are led into the Dining Hall, and are presented a rather predictable discourse with a plantation owner, played by Joshua Browne, with Dube as apparently a shipping magnate (of the cargo of slaves, of course) and the serving girl going through a rather tepid complaint about the horrors of slavery. Which is one paragraph long and which she repeats many, many times. It may just be that 18th and 19th century slave trade is so horrific that its simplest facts are all that`s needed.

We are grateful when Dube leads us to his audience with "Queen B", a thinly disguised Queen of England (Jane Miller). Here the story point is how a colonial nation negotiates its independence. Incredibly, author “Motion” and director Tindyebwa Otu stage the scene as an alluded fornication. So the taboo allure of interracial copulation provides the machinations by which Dube will negotiate the independence of his nation. Here are a random list of scene details which show the incredible artistry of the entire production.

• The sheer silk train has now become a scroll, which represents the treaty under negotiation. (It has appeared in many of the other scenes – it's practically a character in itself)
• At one point the Queen is climbing over Dube like a jungle gym and he is shouting that she must release him. But she isn't holding on to him at all. It is he, holding on to her. Demonstrating that his colonial status is as much mindset as Magna Carta
• And this is the perfect scene to acknowledge sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne. The underscore here is the engine that drives the scene.

Now we move to another Great Room – and are finally in Africa! Dube is now the leader of the liberation government, and is making a speech to a heard but unseen stadium of now freed citizens. (more of Thomas Ryder Payne's soundscaping). In counterpoint is Neema Bickersteth, robed as a noble and singing a ballad unknown to me in her beautiful operatic voice. The Queen and the plantation owner/slaver are also present, demanding their take of the new nation's money.

This scene represents the creative team firing on all cylinders. The pressures on Dube of his new office, the expectations of a newly liberated nation, the ties to old regimes that must be re-booted represent complex contradiction that make for challenging storytelling. Here, Motion and Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu bring us all the contradiction with no platitudes. Very skillful handling that is full of human truth. Once again Pulga Muchochoma ties the scene together with his athletic and allegorical dance.

An entirely electrifying work of theater.

---

Conceived and directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu
Written by Motion
Featuring: Peter Bailey, Jane Miller, Pulga Muchochoma, Joshua Browne and Neema Bickersteth
Sound Design: Thomas Ryder Payne
Production Design: Snezana Pesic
Stage Manager: Jessica Derventzis
Assistant Stage Manager: Anna Plugina

Produced by IFT Theatre in Association with Newface Entertainment.

Disclosure- David Crawford, Newface entertainment producer, is a work colleague. He still makes me pay for my own tickets.

The elephant in the Twitterverse

What keeps large corporations out of the social media space? Because the elephant in the room is -

• C-Suite still doesn't believe there's any money to be made
• If something goes viral, you lose control
• And if it goes viral because you offend hundreds of thousands of people in the Twitterverse, heads will roll.

Well guess what - Canada's Financial Post is reporting that ING, the unmortgage financial powerhouse of the 1990s, has just had every corporations' worse nightmare occur.

Quoting "In early January 2013, ING Direct Canada put into market a new TV commercial to promote its RSP and TFSA products in advance of RSP season. The commercial depicted a clearly stressed out man who viewers soon discover was helped by his wife taking him to ING. It didn’t take long for consumers — who interpreted the ad as making light of symptoms often associated with mental illness — to voice their indignation through social media channels, including direct communication with ING Canada CEO Peter Aceto. The backlash forced the bank to decide whether to do away with the ads during a critical promotional period or sacrifice some of the brand equity it had earned among consumers by keeping the ads on air. "

Read the full story here: How ING Canada prevented a social media 'issue' from becoming a full-blown PR crisis

Not entirely incidentally, ING has just been M&A'd and is now a teeny pimple at Canada's financial powerhouse Scotiabank. Guess they're gonna need a bigger ad agency!

Full disclosure- I am an ING bank customer and that is my promocode ad on the far right Nav. Sign up and get a $25.00 dollars bonus. And so will I.

Why do Canadians put so much of their retirement savings in mutual funds?

David Pett has just written a great article in the Financial Post questioning the value of holding mutual funds in your RRSP. I find Mr Pett totally on-point, largely because his comments  exactly correlate to my own blog post of Oct 2012 listing the  Top Ten reasons not to have Canadian Mutual Funds in your RRSP

Largely the issues remain:

• High management fees (MER)
• Poor management performance
• Weak stock market (since 2008)
• Lack of investment alternatives (poor bond and GIC performance)

Canadians deserve better. After taking a 700 hundred billion dollar haircut in 2008, their ever-nearing retirement lifestyles are in jeopardy due to a lethargic mutual fund management industry.

From the Financial Post:  Mutual funds still popular with Canadians, but why?

World Cancer Day

World Cancer Day will be observed by millions of people in myriad ways. For me it comes only 2 weeks after the 1st Anniversary of my being cured of stage 3 oropharyngeal cancer. Here I reblog the posts that described my journey.

Paging Dr Zoidberg

I am cured of cancer

My cancer anniversary

And for those who are not on this journey, and want to prevent it if possible, an excellent blog posting from the Zoomer website - Foods that prevent cancer

The African Century

I had introduced myself to a woman on Skype, and after about 30 minutes of that easy web chit-chat the conversation naturally ran out of steam. At this point I don't mind sitting in silence because of what happens next – When the conversation resumes, you will be talking about real things.

Sure enough, the women blurted out – "So what do you know about Africa?". My first response was – "Which part of Africa? Africa is a continent, not a country." Suddenly she became very passionate and said "Africa is not the way you depict it in the West!" What she meant was the stories of roving gangs, military rule, and warlords. Although parts of Africa do have those problems. But as it happens, right now the American warlords are using drone aircraft to rain death upon families in Afghanistan; the tribes of the Canadian Indians are blocking highways and railroads because their land settlement claims have not been negotiated, and everyone knows New Jersey is run by the mob.

But I understood completely what she meant. No more CNN horse manure. And as I conducted my interviews I spoke to women from Botswana, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Togo and Uganda.

And after all that I came to the conclusion that the current millennium will be the African Century. Here's how

First - A charismatic leader must emerge who can unite the most wealthy and powerful nations.

Next - to be African is to believe in God. And while not all Africans are Catholic, an interesting situation is occurring - In Vatican City, it is an open secret that the Holy See intends for the next Pope to be African. And now Pope Benedict XVI has announced his resignation due to ailing health. Current papbili include Peter Turkson as the leading candidate for Pope, with Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze also in the running. Having a global spiritual leader from Ghana or Nigeria would move the entire continent forward.

The power and wealth of the citizens is creating a middle class. Everyone I interviewed had a degree, in fields ranging from bachelor's degrees to economics. Meaning these are very bright people, with very employable degrees. And they will become wealthy in good jobs.

Africa must transform her technology infrastructure. When you can make smart phones at RIM in Canada, Nokia in Finland, or Foxcomm in China, you can make a smart phone anywhere. Or perhaps a Smart car. In 25 years the automobile as North Americans know it will no longer exist. People will toot around in self-driving pod sized Smart cars. Almost certainly built by Tata Motors under a license from Google. Africans have been making steel for 2,000 years. I'm sure they can make it through another century or two.

As everyone knows there is an ongoing scientific research project to terraform the Sahara Desert. The primary motivator is not to turn the desert into a jungle. The primary motivation is to stop the sandstorms that threaten large blocks of Africa including air travel. And secondly, to contain the desert at its current size. It's visible from space – that's big enough.

Another factor that brings us into the African Century is the MeerKAT Square Kilometer Array (aka SKA)  The world Astronomy Scientific bodies have decided that the next telescope complex must go in Africa. This of course complements the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory west of Johannesbug. The factors include: Better night vision, the rising class of well educated science minded youth, and the fact that Astronomers currently cannot view that night sky hemisphere with the newest state of the art instruments.

And finally – Ubuntu. D'uh.

One more thing on the subject of the Square Kilometer Array, or SKA. The Selector Cool Blue Lady 

Near Field Payment = Near Fail

Last year CIO.com wrote "it will very likely be years before any sort of NFC-based payment system goes mainstream, according to a new report from technology research firm Forrester Research. Though Forrester predicts 100 million NFC-enabled mobile devices will ship this year, the company says NFC won't reach critical mass, or be used by 15 percent to 25 percent of the global population, for at least three to five years."

Near field payment (NFP) systems represent the holy grail of telco cash grabs. 2013 will see the first serious rollout of NFP in North America. Here's why the invention of Gaston Schwabacher is guaranteed to fail:

10) Consumers already have a debit credit card. They can just reach into their pocket, pull it out, tap and go.
9) The first 10 meters of any WIFI connection are completely unsecured. The media will be filled with firesheeping horror stories
8) There is a class of consumers for whom cash is king. And they include wealthy retirees
7) NFP would be awesome when you're somewhere miles off the grid, such as renting a kayak In Yosemite National Park. There is no WIFI when you are that far off the grid.
6) Western Union will be one of the first NFP service providers. Have you ever sent money by Western Union? Their process involves filling out an entire page of a 3-part NFC form, and all fields are mandatory. That will be a challenge on an iPhone
5) Paypal will be an early provider as well. Everybody hates paypal
4) Your telephone company will be your service provider, and they will force you to use them. Remember when they billed you $100 in roaming charges when you were out of the country? Imagine what happens when you pay a 300 € restaurant bill
3) Your cable company will be a provider. Just like the phone company, only greedier, and harder to locate a CSR
2) It now emerges that Nokia decrypts all your secure transmissions. So does Blackberry. This saves a few kb off your bandwdith consumption. It doesn't save you any money, but it makes you more profitable as a customer.
1) Wireless Carrier outage. There you are, no wallet, no debit card, no credit card, no cash. Just your NFC compliant phone. And the carrier is offline. So what are you going to do now, Einstein? Pay the bill by washing dishes?

I leave the final words to the always awesome Mbugua Njihia, who writes on his blog

Africa has all the ingredients of a successful adoption of mobile payment innovation that can achieve true scale and profit. First, is the sheer number of mobile consumers whose demand for better mobile utility is remains unsatisfied, second is the wide gap in C2B payments on mobile, with the business oriented service attempts on Mpesa, Zap and other mobile money deployments in Africa barely scratching that itch; third is that there have been lessons learnt in mobile money deployments for the masses, lastly and perhaps most important is that we think different – and here I refer to the many minds that tirelessly think outside the box and innovate for the unique African mobile consumer.

The trifecta: mobile applications, mobile web and sms as content and revenue drivers in Africa

Everyone knows Mbugua is correct about NFPS in Africa. But in North America? Near field Payment = Massive Fail