Sylvia Harris is a 40 year old African American jockey, who won her first race in December 2007.  That is a rare feat in itself, but what makes this story truly remarkable is the journey along the way to realizing this achievement.

For starters, Sylvia was diagnosed as being bipolar at the age of 19, and her once stable life started to unravel shortly afterwards.  Her condition would plague her throughout much of her adult life, and was debilitating to the point that she could not even care for her three children, resulting in her periodically losing custody.  Occasionally she was hospitalized due to her condition, with various periods of stability following her psychotic or depressive episodes.

Obviously holding a job was difficult at best and impossible most of the time, and she ended up on welfare trying to support 3 kids as a single mom.  As a final test of her will and spirit, she ended up homeless in 1999 and living in her car for a couple of months, relying on soup kitchens in order to stay alive.  By this time she had given up custody of her children due to her condition, so she was completely alone and estranged from all her family as she struggled to survive.

Fortunately for her, life would turn around slowly, but she was still faced with many roadblocks and seemingly impossible odds of surviving, never mind succeeding in realizing her dream.  When she was given an opportunity to work at a stable at the age of 35, she informed the owner of her desire to race.  This gentleman and his wife took a chance on Sylvia and provided her the opportunity, but shortly thereafter both he and his wife passed away and the farm was shut down.

Following that setback, Sylvia ended up moving around various locations in the U.S., living wherever there was an opportunity for her to work with horses.  She was fired after 3 days at one stable for not working fast enough, and laughed to herself at thinking that she was not even good enough to shovel horse manure.

But she struggled on and continued working odd jobs and travelling to where there was  work, and even looked at coming to Canada for an opportunity to ride.  As was typical in her unforgiving life, she encountered a roadblock due to paperwork not being filed and was turned back at the border.

A series of events led her to an opportunity to ride in Chicago on a horse that no other jockey wanted due to its arthritic knees, and this would prove to be the turning point in her riding career and life.  Wildwood Pegasus would place third in the first race they ran, but ended up winning his next two after that, allowing Sylvia to realize a lifelong dream.

She is now in a place that at times seemed an impossibility, and a number of media outlets including the New York Times have run articles chronicling her incredible story, which is great to see.

Because Sylvia Harris is an inspiration and testament to the human spirit, and a person we can all be proud of, regardless of our race or gender.  I cannot wait to see the movie!

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Image from http://www.safetyworld.com/

Warning labels.

Promoting safety? Not so much.

Protecting massive companies from getting sued by opportunistic morons?

Bingo.

Or maybe, just maybe, people really are that stupid.

That sticker on your lawnmower that tells you not to put your hand on the spinning blade may seem kind of unnecessary. but perhaps people are practising this.

Why? Who knows? They're idiots. And idiots are unpredictable.

You know when you buy new sneakers and there;s that little packet of silica gel that says 'do not eat'? If it didn't say that, would you be inclined to actually try some silica gel? "Hey! my new Pro Keds came with this weird packet of granulated chemicals. I should probably eat some."

Me no think so, Tim.

But maybe it's these very warnings that are encouraging people to risk personal health and safety for that sweet, sweet negligence claim.

Maybe it's human nature (or at least moron nature) to do exactly what we're told not to.

For example: let's say a bottle of window cleaner came with a warning that states 'not for use on babies'. I'd say it's only a matter of weeks before some yokel brings his or her crying but gleaming infant into the emergency ward wondering what possibly could've gone wrong?

People should know better.

Fact! People do not know better.

A bottle of motor oil that says 'poisonous. Flammable. Delicious?'.

Well... maybe it is, you know?

Only one way to find out.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stare at the sun through a telescope while aiming fireworks at my face until those cans of forks are done in the microwave.

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Here is a brief list of the various Special Powers I have accumulated over the years:

- ability to erase memories (unfortunately this only works on myself and only when alcohol is present)

- unlimited jump kicks

- ability to smoke a cigarette while playing Nintendo and still win

- impervious to: alarm clocks, hot sauce, French

- ability to soar horizontally through the air (only for short bursts and without the ability to land)

- unlimited Simpson's references

- conjure invisible air guitar

- can hide a Canadian quarter in my right nostril

- third degree black belt in making girl's feel weird

- ability to drop a "That's what she said" after absolutely any statement made about anything at any time

- advanced barbecue wizardry

- conjure awkward silence

- inability to perform reverse psychology

- spontaneous uncontrollable sneeze attacks

James Howard Kunstler is an American writer currently employed by Rolling Stone magazine. He is the author of The Geography of Nowhere (which we reviewed here), The Long Emergency, among others. He was in town recently as a visiting Fellow of Simon Fraser University, and gave a presentation the other night. I went along to see what he has been thinking about lately.

As far as Kunstler is concerned, the building of North American suburbia was a fifty-year-long experiment that has failed because shortages of oil in the near future will quickly render them unworkable. This failure will have profound effects on the way North American society is organized, and how it should approach its future.

He stated that the world's oil supply peaked around 1999/2000, and has been declining since. He had facts and figures (duly shown), and the US Department of Energy agrees. The USA currently uses 20 million barrels of oil every day, and this oil (by 2020 or so) will no longer be available. We'd better start thinking about what to do about that, and soon.

That I knew already; please tell me more. Okay, here's more:

The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and rescale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.

There is No More Oil, and the Earth is not making any more. It has more urgent things to do as it tries to cope with climate change.

Kunstler did not touch on climate change, referring instead to Al Gore's well-known work on the topic. He did, though, list a few other predictions:

As oil becomes increasingly unavailable, 30-mile commutes also become undoable. Forget living in the 'burbs and driving off to work each day: it'll soon cost you $100 in gas each way, and become impossible thereafter.

As sub-prime mortgages continue to collapse, a suburban home will decrease in value, until it becomes a liability. This is now happening all over the USA, in places that were believed to be recession-proof as little as two years ago.

Truckloads of produce from California will not appear in your grocery stores anymore, nor will truckloads of meat from Alberta or Montana. What will you eat? And where will it come from?

Likewise, similar loads (either by truck or by ship) of cheap stuff from China will no longer be delivered to the nation's shopping malls. What is going to replace that? Will the exurban shopping mall survive?

He spoke about the important need to rebuild (in the USA, at least) a rail system that was pretty much abandoned in the 1950s when interstate highways were built. 'The infrastructure's still there,' he said, 'out rusting in the rain.'

His most interesting idea was the simultaneous need to rebuild the also largely abandoned system of inland waterways. He comes from the Hudson River Valley in New York, and has seen entire towns closed down when the shipping business transferred to trucks on the Interstates, and the local factories and mills shut down in favour of cheap stuff from China.

His main idea is that we should go back to doing things the way they were done 60 years ago, before urban landscapes were defined by freeways and commuter traffic reports on the radio. Instead think of a landscape consisting more of farms and cottage industries, connected by rail and, where possible, canals. He thinks that cities would thus be more liveable (without endless suburbs), we'd eat better, and the economy would be healthier and more realistic. It’s a simplistic idea, but I think he finds it attractive (as do I).

Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are.

Is it possible?

I think it is, given political will and the benefits of selected bits of modern technology. Some Northern European countries are already setting examples. Then too, I've also heard people claim that if we could just capture a small percentage of the energy given to us for free every day by the sun, we’d have plenty of energy. Could that be done in 10 years? Probably not. Could it be done in 20 or 25 years? Probably.

Mr. Kunstler is a practiced and engaging speaker. Rather funny, too, referring to suburbs as 'asteroid belts,' and saying things like 'America today has a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of.' What he says is well worth thinking about and, I think, only slightly exaggerated.

Swanktrendz: You're website is impressive both for the sheer volume of info available and for the individual band members' input. During your live shows, the band has great interaction with the audience (as Christine had the pleasure of witnessing in Vancouver recently). Are internet/live interactions something the band naturally enjoys, (as it appears), or is it something you look at as a promotion necessity?

Dan/The Dudes: We've never been prank pullers really. We just make jokes. You get up early, half drunk still and start looking for the comedy. That's how to stay sane.