Consolation Champs

The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner

A few days ago, I got a call from the public library informing me that a book I’d put on hold had become available. I’d completely forgotten what book it was, but the timing couldn’t have been better. Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World reached me at the beginning of a new year, at a time when I’ve been thinking about my own life and happiness quite a bit.

I’d discovered the book after reading about it on my Icelandic friend Alda’s blog. Weiner, a correspondent for National Public Radio, had visited Iceland and met with her in his research. As it turns out, Icelanders regularly score highly on surveys of the happiest people in the world, despite their isolation, unforgiving climate, and the fact that they spend most of the winter in perpetual darkness. Hopefully, the economic meltdown won’t dampen their spirits too much. But it fascinated me, Weiner’s quest to find the world’s happiest people. He traverses the globe, writing chapters about specific countries/cultures, both happy and unhappy, to see how happiness is defined elsewhere and how it is pursued. Though he’s a self-professed “grump,” he’s also a very entertaining writer and someone I wouldn’t mind sharing a beer with. But that’s hardly surprising, since over the years, I’ve always seemed to attract friends who seemed less happy than I did. Which is to say that I’ve always considered myself generally a very happy person (perhaps an 8 out of 10). The thing that has me thinking about happiness so much lately is that over the past year or so, I think I’ve dropped to about a 7 (or even a 6 some weeks). Now this could be the dreaded “mid-life crisis” but I want to understand it a little more.

It turns out Weiner is around my age, so I find his questions similar to my own. I burned through 90% of the book yesterday and hope to finish it today. In addition to being a highly entertaining travelogue (he visits Iceland, Bhutan, and Moldova, among other places), the book is a very honest and personal quest to understand happiness, if not to seek it out directly. Weiner provides a good overview of the relatively new field of “happiness studies” (or positive psychology as it’s more formally known). Instead of simply trying to understand damaged psyches, why not try to find out what makes a healthy one so healthy? A quick peek at Amazon tells me that books about happiness are all the rage right now, but what I liked about this one is the author’s wanderlust and desire to find out what makes particular cultures happier than others. I think he hits it on the head when he says that it’s our relationships with other people that ultimately determine our happiness, and that sometimes you have to remove yourself from your own culture (by comparing it with others) to understand it better. I’ll surely have more thoughts after I’ve finished the book, but I can give The Geography of Bliss my heartiest (happiest?) endorsement.

My album of 2008

Exactly one year ago, I posted my list of the best of 2007. Strange then that I woke up at 6:00am this morning thinking of putting together my 2008 list. I’m a subscriber to eMusic, so most of my music this year has come through downloads from this excellent service. As well, my experience attending some of the music portion of SXSW has helped me find new music this year. Looking over this list, some are quite recent listens, while others have become old favourites, so it’s a little hard to rank them precisely. That being said, here are my choices (idiosyncratic and personal, definitely) for the best music released in 2008:

1. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
2. British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music?
3. Okkervil River - The Stand Ins
4. Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust
5. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
6. Deerhunter - Microcastles
7. Love is All - A Hundred Things Keep Me Up at Night
8. Islands - Arm’s Way
9. The Jealous Girlfriends - The Jealous Girlfriends
10. Emiliana Torrini - Me and Armini

Just outside the top ten (either due to quality or just not enough listens yet):

• Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
• The Dears - Missiles
• Portishead - Third
• The Vivian Girls - The Vivian Girls
• Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster
• Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

Here are some of the “pro’s” lists:

Chromewaves Best of 2008
Pitchfork Top 50 Albums of 2008
Last.fm’s Albums of the Year
Britt Daniel (Spoon) picks his best of 2008 on the Merge Records blog

How about you? What were some of your favourites?

I love this:

I never wanna write short stories again. They suck. They’re incredibly demanding. A story can be perfect. No novel can be perfect. Novels are awesome. Novels are like us.

From an interview with CBC News reporter Sarah Liss

I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now and really enjoying it. Perhaps I’ll write a review when I’m finished. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s worth reading.

My Twitterpal April Dunford talks about Nortel’s teleworking policy in this Youtube video (sorry, can’t seem to embed it on the page). Not only is teleworking good for productivity and the environment, but it also helps them save millions in real estate costs. I’ve long been an advocate of this kind of flexibility in working arrangements, and it’s nice to see one of Canada’s biggest telecommunications companies taking such a progressive stance.

cross-posted from Toronto Screen Shots

On Wednesday, my wife Brooke and I will be flying to Iceland for the fifth edition of the Reykjavik International Film Festival. We’re staying for the entire duration of the festival, which runs from September 25th through October 5th, and in addition to seeing films, we’ll be doing some sightseeing. We’ve rented a car for the entire time, and are hoping to see as much as we can, including the Golden Circle (the geyser at Geysir, the waterfall at Gullfoss and the site of the world’s oldest parliament at Þhingvellir National Park), the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, and possibly an overnight stay on Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands. Other planned activities include whale-watching and horseback riding, depending on the weather.

All that to say that I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to cover the film festival yet. Ideally, I’ll be able to blog as usual, posting reviews shortly after seeing the films, but because it’s a vacation, I might just be having too much fun to post right away.

Though the entire schedule hasn’t yet been posted, the main program (Open Seas) features the following 18 films:

• 33 sceny z zycia (33 Scenes From Life) - Malgorzata Szumowska
• Pandoranin kutusu (Pandora’s Box) - Yesim Ustuoglu
• Adoration - Atom Egoyan
• Avant que j’oublie (Before I Forget) - Jacques Nolot
• Piao lang qing chun (Drifting Flowers) - Zero Chou
• Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (I’ve Loved You So Long) - Philipe Claudel
• Good Cats - Ying Liang
• Revanche - Götz Spielmann*
• Frygtelig lykkelig (Terribly Happy) - Henrik Ruben Genz*
• Barcelona (A Map) - Ventura Pons
• Venkovský ucitel (The Country Teacher) - Bogdan Slama*
• Zui yao yuan de ju li (The Most Distant Course) - Jing-Jie Lin*
• A Feast of Villains - Pan Jian-Lin
• My Winnipeg - Guy Maddin*
• O’Horten - Bent Hamer*
• A Nyomozó (The Investigator) - Attila Galambos
• Dos Miradas (Two Looks) - Sergio Candel
• Til døden os skiller (With Your Permission) - Paprika Steen*

Some of these played at TIFF this year and some others were released earlier, but I haven’t seen any of them. So far, I’m planning on seeing the ones marked with asterisks based on either recommendations from friends or just my own interest. If you have any recommendations I haven’t marked, please comment and let me know why I should see them.

With our trip to Iceland just a few weeks away, I was delighted to discover Iceland Socks, a promotional site for the Iceland Express airline. They’re already a pretty hip company, with a great blog featuring lots of information on music and other stuff, but Iceland Socks is pretty amazing. The site lets you quickly create your own travelogue movie, starring a pair of sock puppets you can name. You can add subtitled dialogue in up to three scenes. Lots of fun and a great way to get people to think about Iceland’s “other airline”.

You can see my masterpiece here.

It was almost exactly a year ago that I wrote about changing jobs, and now I’m at it again. Luckily, this year doesn’t involve a change of address as well. The past year at PricewaterhouseCoopers has been an education for me. I’d never really worked in such a large corporate office environment before, and despite being surrounded by great people, I felt isolated. As well, my job function was quite specialized and I never really felt I was flexing all my muscles, especially when it came to social media. In addition, the combination of some legacy technology limitations as well as a generally risk-averse culture left me feeling frustrated a lot of the time. Despite my manager’s and team’s enthusiasm for social media, it was just too difficult to put much into action in such a large corporate environment. My job devolved into writing (or rewriting) corporate marketing copy and then waiting for various levels of approval. For someone coming from an entrepreneurial environment where I was basically a one-man-web-band, the adjustment was difficult.

A few months back, I was introduced to Leona Hobbs, the marketing honcho (honcha?) at Tucows who was looking for someone for her team. It turned out that it wasn’t the right position (my euphemistic way of saying I wasn’t qualified) and I didn’t think I’d hear from Leona or Tucows again. And then about six weeks ago, she contacted me about a brand new position with her team and after several weeks of interviews and paperwork, I’m happy to announce that on Monday August 25th, I’ll join Tucows as a Community Specialist. The job description ticks off all my favourite boxes and basically allows me to be an internet rockstar for money. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but I’m looking forward to stretching out in the social media space again.

I know this opportunity wouldn’t have come along without all the meeting and greeting and learning I’ve been doing in the past year, starting with the Talk is Cheap unconference, continuing throughout the year at the excellent Third Tuesday PR events, CaseCamp and Mesh, in addition to my eighth South by Southwest Interactive conference. To everyone I’ve met and chatted with over the past few months (and especially to my colleagues at PwC), thank you for giving me the benefit of your knowledge, your experience, your connections and your encouragement. I hope that I’ll be able to repay it in some way.

I had the amazing experience of eating at Momofuku Ssam Bar a few weeks ago while I was in New York. My friends Dan and Kathryn took me and I let them order whatever they thought was good. I have to say that it was one of the most sublime eating experiences I’ve had in my entire life. Best of all, because they were early advocates of the restaurant, they know chef David Chang pretty well, and throughout the evening, a number of courses arrived at our table “on the house.” David even stopped by our table before he left for the evening to say hello. All in all, an amazing experience and one I can’t wait to repeat.

Now, my local (jealous) friend Neil has pointed me to this Charlie Rose interview with David. I suppose it might just be that much harder to get a table now, which is too bad. But I wish Momofuku every success.

Amazing blog: For Those Who Tried to Rock, chronicling “every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations.”

You’d better believe that the Gitch Band will soon be included in the canon of “those who tried to rock”!!! But I’ll post the story here first. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to lift some of our music off that ancient cassette somehow.

(via Canuckflack)

The Toronto Star reports today that Air Canada is laying off another 632 flight attendants, trying to cut costs associated with the soaring cost of fuel. Most interesting was a compilation of measures other airlines are taking in a desperate effort to keep flying:

• American Airlines has removed pillows from most domestic flights to save $375,000 a year.
• American and others are charging $15 for the first checked bag.
• Southwest Airlines is among those slowing down to reduce fuel.
• Delta has swapped heavier seats for models weighing about 5 pounds less.
• American’s new drink carts are 17 pounds lighter, a move that saves 1.9 million gallons of fuel a year.
• Lufthansa is among those washing its planes more often to reduce wind resistance.
• Japan Airlines is redesigning cutlery to save 2 grams per piece. It is also saving 50 pounds per flight by cutting the number of newspapers and magazines it carries.
• Cathay Pacific has removed paint from its 747 freighters, removing as much as 440 pounds per plane.
• Delta is studying whether it is feasible to divide pilot manuals required on each flight between the captain and first officer, so they are not toting duplicate sets of five or six books that each weigh about a pound and a half.
• Northwest is carrying 25 percent less water for bathroom taps and toilets on international flights. Each 25 pounds removed, saves $440,000 a year.

It is definitely only a matter of time before passengers will be paying fares based on their own weight. With rising obesity rates in the developed world, some passengers may find themselves, er, grounded unless they can pay their way. It only seems fair, since there are already extra charges for overweight baggage. But I wonder what kind of a “human rights” kerfuffle will result?

With some peak oil commentators like James Howard Kunstler arguing that the whole airline industry will be dead and gone within 24 months, the point may be moot.