PEI on Everything^2

I really liked this part of the Everything^2 node for PEI:

Many (but not all) inhabitants of Prince Edward Island suffer from a strange phenomenon I call "delusional island antagonism syndrome" or DIAS for short.

Visitors to P.E.I. (or "the Island") generally fall in love with the rolling green hills, the rich red clay, the hot white beaches, and the picturesque cityscape. Those who were born and raised on the Island, though, tend to either overlook this magical scenery, or view it as tied to the oppressive and ignorant agrarian society they hate. These sufferers of DIAS consider PEI a prison to escape, not someplace to which to move.

These poor souls often operate under the (false) belief that big cities have higher proportions of cool people. This just isn't the case. Big cities do have more cool people, but only because they have more people, more people of every sort – and therefore more ignorant, rude, stupid people as well. I've met lots of cool people that were raised in weird back-corners of a rural community or even a small city; I've also met scores and scores of incredibly uncool people who were raised in the big city.

To be sure, there are some places on P.E.I. I would never want to live. There are some places here where I would never want to raise children. And I've already acclimated myself to the need to move away, to a big city, in order to go to graduate school, and it is unlikely I'll ever live on P.E.I. after that. But P.E.I. is still one of the best places in the universe to live.

I love Everything^2, it's sort of the tongue-in-cheek Wikipedia where trivia and shit-talk are encouraged as long as you can write half-way decently. I should remember to check it more.

Labels: Everything2, PEI

Sharon Labchuk saves the bees

Wow, Sharon Labchuk has way more important things to do than campaign, apparently she just single-handedly solved the problem of bee colonies dying off: No Organic Bee Losses is a letter she wrote that ended up on Reddit. Seriously. This is really interesting news, and I never usually expect to see an islander's name pop up when I'm doing my news surfing.

From the article:

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

...

By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

The article presents a very good case for that animals probably had their reasons for evolving the way they have. If beekeepers hadn't all started growig larger bees they wouldn't have the Varroa mite problem, and wouldn't have had to pump so many antibiotics into their colonies, and we wouldn't be facing a widespread collapse of bee populations.

The analogy to bovine growth hormone is probably not an overly solid one but it's the first thing I thought of when reading this.

Go Sharon :)

Labels: Biology, Environment, Farming, PEI, Science, Zoology

Dean Constable

Dean is so far the only candidate to show up at my door, which was before the election was actually called. Sabrina spoke to him for quite a while about community swimming facilities and the fact that the CARI isn't really fulfilling its mandate, and is turning into more of a publicly-subsidized private health club. He was genuinely interested in what she was saying and made a note of it to take away with him. I was quite impressed that he did a lot more listening than talking.

He was on the radio this morning talking about video lottery terminals and promising to do what he could to try and get rid of them, including exercising what influence he could in opposition. I fully support this and am glad he mentioned that the money that goes into those is money that would have gone into the economy in some other form anyway. He didn't mention it but it's not people who have a high rate of savings who use these, it's mostly people who live paycheque to paycheque, and it really is shameful that the government has come to rely on them as a form of income.

Pat Martel was asking him questions and seemed to take a bit of a condescending tone at a couple of points. Dean answered the questions well, and it was refreshing to hear a politician say exactly what he thought was right rather than couching his statements in language to not offend entrenched interests. And good for him for pointing out that the Racino (ugh) is losing money, so the VLTs really aren't helping the local harness racing industry at all.

I think Dean would do well to try and slow down his rate of speech, he came off as a bit nervous. Something I've learned to consciously do is to speak slowly and retain control over the flow of discussion by making someone wait until you have made your point rather than trying to squeeze as many words as you can in the time the other person decide to let you speak. The last thing people want to be reminded of in NDP leaders is the tendency to be excitable and shrill.

Labels: Elections, NDP, PEI, Politics

Go West

It's strange how I can be completely genuinely supportive when encouraging my friends to pick up and move away. It just kills me to hear people sound so down on themselves when they can't dig up opportunity for themselves in the place they've come to think of as home.

I sometimes feel like the odd one out for actually being pretty contented with my career and my life here. Not sure how long I'll be happy keeping up my current life, but so far my family and the closest thing I have to life-long friends are here and I'm happy for that. I'm also pretty satisfied with my current job. It's nothing exciting or earth-changing, but I'm good at it and I'm appreciated and I get to do a lot of different things.

I just wonder what it will be like when all the people I know have all moved away.

Maybe they'll all come back here when they retire.

Labels: Life, PEI, Work