Manitoba Links Weekly: No, We Don't Learn (ManLinkWeek 15)

What, really, Tuesday already? Wow, that was quick. All right, roll out the ManLinkWeek!

[bostoncrew82 YouTube: Personality Crisis - Monteray Pavilion Winnipeg 19.4.83]
A few weeks back I'd posted a roughly-twenty-five-minute set by a historically significant punk band playing Winnipeg in 1983, so here this week is... another roughly-twenty-five-minute set by a historically significant punk band playing Winnipeg in 1983. I don't know if this is becoming a trend on YouTube or what, but man, would I enjoy it if it did.

War on Music had rereleased the Personality Crisis 1983 Creatures for Awhile LP a few years ago, but their stock has long since sold out. (The 1990 UK reissue would run you sixty bucks on eBay, but forget that noise.) So this is some pretty rare footage of some pretty rare music, and not a half bad way for your computer speakers to spend the next half an hour or so.

[Music Trader Blog: JOHN K. SAMSON LIVE! @ MUSIC TRADER]
Free John K. Samson show? Free John K. Samson show, this Friday night at 7:00 inside Music Trader. Friday is a high of -5 and a low of -10, so it wouldn't be terribly uncomfortable to hang around outside, but if you'd really rather be indoors to see him play I would recommend getting there early. (It is, as I'm sure you're aware, not the largest venue.)

[92.9 KICK FM Facebook: Dear friends, today...]
Oh, and in a less encouraging story, our radio market is losing one of its very few remaining stations that doesn't play Maroon 5 or Kid Rock. The news doesn't come as a complete surprise; the campus and community radio policy was revised and released in 2010, although the CRTC has been inconsistent about those revisions would mean. But the end of the year may very well mean one fewer community station on Winnipeg airwaves, and knowing the CRTC we can expect that frequency to be some corporation's new Hit Music station by the spring of 2013.

[Progressive Winnipeg: Assiniboine Avenue Vindication]
Speaking of unsurprising, the consultants behind the Assiniboine Avenue bikeway project were charlatans who fudged numbers and forged consultation, nobody on City Council could be bothered to listen to public concerns or question the information they had been handed, and nobody involved in the whole mess would admit that any wrongdoing or impropriety had occurred until the relevant documents were forcefully wrangled out of the system through Freedom of Information action.

I wish I were more excited or optimistic about these revelations than I am, and I wish I could say that we all learned something from this (or at least, learned something we didn't all already know) -- but ours is a city that very steadfastly refuses to learn from its mistakes, never mind the idea of ever correcting them. You can literally listen to the Mayor talk about the story for five minutes and never once hear anything resembling a commitment to any concrete change or safeguards in future consultation projects; he won't even commit to not using those exact same consultants again.

My pessimism for the future aside -- what a ray of sunshine I am today -- this is the culmination of tremendous work by Graham, who struggled against the various departments of City Hall for well over a year on this case, and whose art display runs until the 28th if you might like to check out what else he gets up to.

[Erica Glazier: Oversocialized!: Damn cold on the prairies: a photo essay.]
The photos are nice, but I really love the concept expressed herein that looking out the window foreshadows one's day in Winnipeg because the industrial smoke and steam and whatever the hell else is going on out there behave differently depending on how extreme the cold is outside. I'd love to see somebody better with science than I am (granted that this isn't a particularly stringent requirement) do a series treating our city as one big interactive experiment, running around and using our uniquely miserable climate to explain why smoke floats differently in the air and how soap bubbles freeze into solid structures and why heated beverages vanish when thrown. There are probably a million fun things that aren't normally possible in places where it doesn't hit minus-forty, so we may as well have fun with them when it does, you know?

[The Crime Scene (Winnipeg Sun): City libraries under the microscope]
Good news is hard to come by these days in the world of library economics, and as with most economic comparisons Winnipeg leaves sparks behind for how hard it scrapes along the bottom of the rankings. It would also appear that we as a city are not big readers to begin with; our circulation and visit statistics rank dramatically low, though Montreal somehow manages to make even us look good on that front. (Literacy as a whole could be doing better in Canada, actually.)

Securing funding from levels of government remains a widespread library concern in the continued (and continued, and continued) economic downturn, certainly no less of a concern here in our financially bungling city ($1B debt by 2014!) and forever have-not province. Financial challenges require continual creativity, and Turner notes in a follow-up post that the WPL will be rolling out smartphone service in the near future to try and drive usage, so here's hoping that it succeeds beyond anybody's wildest expectations and that the ensuing statistical bumps will earn our city's public libraries a healthy financial infusion. And I'm not just saying that because of my MLIS degree and my continued near-unemployment.

(Augh, I knew I should have gone into Landfill Helping.)

[Slurpees & Murder (UPTOWN Magazine): Off-track discussion]
I keep meaning to plug my own columns when they drop on Thursdays (every Thursday, I get to tell people now), but by the time they're out I'm usually occupied with writing for the next week's deadline. Then I work the late night weekend shifts slinging cheap hooch for nickels, derp around with the guys on Sunday, get Reader Submissions lined up for the new week, and then -- what, Tuesday already? We just had a Tuesday!

Anyway, speaking as I was earlier of us as a city never learning anything, you would reasonably expect after one-hundred-and-thirty-some-odd years of train service that we would have figured out how to not get hit by trains. But, nope! Not our style. These accidents on tracks still happen with astonishing regularity, and so -- with only a few months left before the grand opening of our rapid transit corridor -- the capital-c City had to warn the lower-case-c city that walking on the rapid transit tracks can get you hit by a rapid transit bus. Some folks around town took a bit of umbrage to this apparent patronization; what, do they think we're stupid? And the answer in this particular case is, no, they know we're stupid. So, for how often I disagree with the City, I can say they got it right on this one.

Thank you for reading ManLinkWeek!