Cameco Rabbit Lake: The Happiest Place on Earth

Monday: December 12th

Hours: 8:00am - 7:30pm

I'm sitting on my bed in a cold dorm room at the Rabbit lake mine site. Its 8:57 PM. Despite how far north we are, (about a 45 minute flight past La Ronge,) the weather was pretty mild for mid-December. I assume I have to enjoy the small comforts during my stay, lest I go insane.

The day began as my profundity for packing light was shamed by the airline check-in when they informed me that my bag weighed 26 pounds, and thus was 6 pounds overweight. Apart from wondering what the hell I packed that was so heavy, I pondered why my supplies for a week's stay could only weigh as much as a stout 2 year old. Then I saw the plane and pondered no further.

I'm pretty sure I could pull one of these planes down the runway by myself given a length of rope and a desire to enter muscleman competitions. After cramming 20 of us on this thing, we were on our way. The mood on the plane was somber. I felt like declaring "Once more unto the breach dear friends" as we took off into a blizzard, but decided that might get me beat up.

Cameco sites are kind of like summer camp for kids whose parents don't know what fun is. I haven't been here but 5 hours, and already I'm staggered by the depths of bureaucracy. Everyone is in charge, yet nobody knows what's going on. So most of today was spent sitting around waiting for news of our arrival to spread to every relevant corner of the site, lest one office worker be left out and revealed as superfluous.

The room in I now dwell in feels abandoned. My night lights strobe and sputter as if brought in from the set of the movie Doom. The 9 inch television, (which I'm told I was lucky to have,) just wails at me sharply when I turn it on. Its high-pitched shriek suggests that I have woken it to some fresh hell, and that it would rather die than exist here for another second. Mercifully, I pulled the plug. I'm told all of C wing is like this, and that I should stop being such a little bitch.

That said, why is half of my wardrobe padlocked shut? What's in there? Narnia? Because if it's just toilet paper, I could really use it. There's apparently a toilet paper famine here right now.

The food is pretty good though. Score one for the small comforts.

Tuesday: December 13th

Hours: 6:30am - 9:00pm

I snap awake to a cruel 5:30am alarm. I've only had 4 hours sleep, but it's a small price to pay for a bottomless plate of morning bacon. You win this round Cameco.

But just as I began to ascend Mt. Bacon, I was informed we had to rush to catch the essential 6:30am safety meeting. Off we ventured into a morning wind that could charitably be described as "brisk". It would be another 20 minutes of sitting around before the meeting actually started.

"That's Cameco for ya," Chris quipped, "hurry up and wait."

Finally our actual job began. We had to replace a panel and about 100 devices in the residential quarters for long-term employees. These quarters may as well have been Valhalla: queen-sized beds, flat-screen televisions, a functioning fire system, carpeting...

Meanwhile, in cell-block C, someone decided to remove all the shower curtains from the men's washroom. I dropped the soap in the shower and had vivid "Oz" flashbacks. I snapped out of it yelling "LOLLIPOP GUILD, NO!" Some native guys looked at me funny. I may have just sullied the reputation of white people forever.

Actually the prison analogy isn't quite fair. It's more like an unkempt trailer park. If all the trailers were welded together into one big trailer.

We managed to do a two day job in one 14 hour day today. If our luck and energy hold out, we could be out of here by Friday. A sword of Damocles is held by the Cameco brass however. All they have to do is utter the phrase "well, since you're up here..." and then we're boned. We'll find out tomorrow. Meanwhile, since this is a dry camp, I have only the gentle roar of the mill to keep me warm at night. I may die. Again, we'll find out tomorrow.

Wait... braised short ribs for lunch and fried chicken and back ribs for supper!? Fuck yeah; I wanna live.

Wednesday: December 14th

Hours: 7:00am - 7:00pm

It's day 3. I've gotten used to the smell of sweaty ass that permeates the walls of this place. Perhaps it's because I am now contributing to it.

Things are looking up in cell block C though: the shower curtains have mysteriously re-appeared, and the chill of my room has been replaced with a sweltering heat, which is still an upgrade in the winter. Plus, our work is more-or-less done. A few minor tweaks and a plane ride and I'll be back in Saskatoon boring you all with more hyperbolic and long-winded descriptions of this place. It's a proud feeling knowing that we not only completed a job, but made it our bitch.

I was in the mill all day, so I now know what yellow-cake uranium smells like. All the safety gear was sweaty as hell, but for the first time this trip, I felt like an unaccompanied miner.

I'll give you all a second to let my genius wordplay waft over you...

...alright then. You're welcome.

Also, the prime rib they served for supper was a little dry. So it's official. This place blows.

Thursday: December 15th

Hours: 7:00am - 5:30pm

Overheard at the lunch table: "There's 300 feet of dick in this camp, and I can't get 6 fucking inches!" Touche' hideous woman. I suppose that's one of the unexpected drawbacks to a camp without alcohol. She's right about one thing though: there is indeed more sausage here than the deli section of Safeway.

I fly out tomorrow. All I have to do is scrub the radioactive dust off my boots, and some minor paperwork. The Internet here is unusable, but if it worked, my Facebook status would be "OMG COMIN BACK TO STOON BITCHES!!!!!!!1111ROFL LETS G3T SH1TTY LOL" Or something. Chris flew out earlier today, so everyone looked to me to learn how to make a fire system work. My vague answers either placated or enraged them, but who cares. I'm gone tomorrow.

I learned there's an indoor smoking section near C block called "X-wing". "Hey," I said, "we should take this thing go blow up the death star!" Had that line not garnered odd looks, I might have made a reference to photon torpedoes. Instead, the other guys in X-wing started speaking Cree to block me out of conversation. Twice now have I tainted the centuries of good will built up between our peoples. Sorry whitey.

I'd pray for this camp to burn to the ground, but I know for a fact they have a pretty up-to-date fire system, so I'll probably be back in a few months. I'm not sure if I'll loath coming back here. The long hours and sub-par accommodations were lame, but there was also enough bacon, coffee, and strudel to cause a skinny man to gain 10 pounds.

Regardless, I carved "BROOKS WAS HERE" over the door in my room. This will probably piss off the cleaning ladies. But whatever. I'm gone tomorrow.

Three Cartons Per Week!?

Ah, provincial budget season. A magical time when the local media works itself into a frenzy, pouring over copies of their precious budget document.

Who won? Who got screwed? What does every local organization have to say? Don’t worry fair reader; everything you wanted to know and way, way more will be addressed.

Allow me to pick out one item from the budget that is perhaps, if not the most important story, the most entertaining. Part of a long line of sin-tax hikes laid out in this budget that will allow this government to round out its income is a restriction on the number of tax-free cigarettes that can be purchased on reserve lands.

Until now, treaty-card holders could purchase up to three cartons, (that’s 600 cigarettes,) per week without paying those ridiculously high tobacco taxes. This has been reduced to one carton per week.

Naturally, the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) is up in arms. Vice Chief Morley Watson said the decision will cost First Nations businesses millions in lost revenues.
“This is Indian Agent mentality,” he said in a FSIN news release. “The old Indian Agent would tell us how much grain, wood, fence posts and other goods we could produce and provide for our families.”

At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, who the hell smokes three cartons of cigarettes a week?

Let’s do the math here. 600 cigarettes every week, (or 24 packs,) rounds out to about 86 cigarettes a day. That’s three and a half cigarettes an hour, assuming you never slept. Allowing for a little more than six hours of sleep a night, that number is closer to five cigarettes an hour, or a cigarette every 12 minutes on average.

Is cutting that back to one cigarette every 36 minutes really that tyrannous? This seems a little too reasonable to be labelled as “Indian Agent mentality”. Especially since these numbers only apply to tax-free cigarettes. On taxed cigarettes, the amount treaty card-holders can buy is still infinite.

The FSIN makes other, more valid claims about the government’s “serious infringement on Treaty Rights without the benefit of meaningful consultation” in this case. It’s true that the Province has extended its authority beyond its jurisdiction, since treaty lands are under the authority of the federal government.

But really, three cartons? Even a two-pack-a-day smoker would still have ten packs left over by the end of the week. I guess that’s where the affect on First Nations business comes into play. These extra packs can be sold to non-treaty card-holders for a profit. Is that really the spirit behind the tax-free cigarette allotment?

There are plenty of things that First Nations people have to be angry with the provincial government about. Cutting back on cheap smokes is not one of them.

Finally, a Fundraiser Worth Supporting

My Ink story this week is about Windows 7. You can find it at jschool.ca. There's not much more to say about it really, so instead I'm going to talk about Desert Bus for Hope.

Desert Bus is probably the cruelest, most boring video game ever made. It was created by (now) Two and a Half Men producer Eddie Gorodetsky, and comedy-magician duo Penn and Teller in 1995 for a compilation of scam games that was never officially released. It's overly realistic nature was a satirical response to controvercies surrounding violent video games at the time.

The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45 miles per hour. It takes 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game can't be paused.

The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other traffic on the road. It veers to the right slightly, so it's impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road, it will stall and be towed all the way back to the start, also in real time.

If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point. It's a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends. Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some have earned as many as 99 points, (the maxumum allowable by the game,) which would take over 41 days of continuous play to accomplish.

In 2007, Victoria-based online sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun started a marathon session of the game called Desert Bus for Hope to raise money for worldwide children's hospital toy drives. Their team played the game continuously in turns. More donations meant more hours of gameplay added to the marathon.

November 20th marks the third year of the event. Last year's marathon lasted over 5 days and raised over $70 thousand.

Watch and donate here. And spread the love.

The Problem of Streeters

It's high time we acknowledge what is considered to be a necessary evil in journalism: streeters.

For those outside the news industry, "streeters" is the mildly pejorative term for "people on the street". The idea is that a journalist should go out and ask "average Joe citizen" what he or she thinks on a current issue. This opinion is then reduced to a sound byte and inserted into a news story or sidebar, often alongside the opinions of a number of other streeters. When a news story is comprised entirely of streeters, the piece itself is called a streeter.

Questions for streeters range from hard to soft news; from "should the government pull out of Afghanistan" to "how about this weather we're having". These stories can be used to gauge reaction to an event, survey public opinion, or to fill space as the case may be.

The vast majority of my journalist peers despise doing streeter stories, as do I. It can be hard to convince people walking the sidewalks to take time out of their day and talk, on the record, about a topic they may have little knowledge of or interest in. The possibility of being on the 6:00 news only sometimes outweighs a person's fear of looking like an idiot.

What this means for the journalist is an hour or two of rejection from complete strangers. Understandably, this makes these stories a giant pain in the ass to do.

I vividly remember standing next to a building in downtown Saskatoon with a microphone, asking passers-by what they thought about H1N1. Looking around, I noticed a few homeless people on either side of me asking for spare change.

The parallel was a bit chilling.

I can see why editors like sending reporters to get streeters; it's a reliable, simple, and easy way to fill gaps in content, especially on a slow news day.

But as a news follower, I tend to see streeter content as lazy, pointless journalism. What do I care what Anne the laundromat attendant thinks about health care? Who is she, and why is her opinion valuable? Since when is coffee row an authority on anything?

But streeters aren't just problematic at a content level. There are ethical considerations here that need to be acknowledged. First of all, the notion of streeters implies the existence of the "average person". I have yet to meet this "average person" in my time as a reporter, but if I do, I have a feeling that he or she would be very boring.

Beyond that, what are journalists actually doing when they ask a streeter for an opinion? They are choosing somebody, at random, to speak on behalf of everybody else.

This, to put it simply, is not fair.

It's not fair to that individual, it's not fair to everybody else, and it's not fair to the journalist who's recording device has suddenly become the infallible wand of public opinion.

So, by way of a conclusion, I'll put in a request to editors and news directors everywhere: please... no more streeters. These stories are nothing but a crutch for when the idea well runs dry. I know coming up with actual story ideas is tough. Really tough.

But with a little more effort, we can make journalism everywhere a little stronger.

Introducing: Motherboard

Technology and Religion

I'm quickly becoming the "technology guy" around here. I suppose that's what I signed up for.
To me, interesting technology stories aren't about what technology can do, but what people use it for. Technological gadgets and concepts are tools. That's it. They can't revolutionize anything without people willing to adopt them.
And once they do, what does technology do to the conventions and traditional concepts relating to the thing you use it for. There have always been romantic relationships; but when you throw technology in to them, how do these relationships change? Is that change good or bad?
That's the approach I took in researching an article on technology and religion.
I find there's all sorts of clarifications a writer has to make in talking about religion. For example, when you say "religion", do you mean the church as a business, do you mean the cultural institution, or do you mean faith in God or gods.
For the record, I mean that second one.
It's interesting how religious institutions feel the need to have an online presence in order to reach out to people. The Internet, inherently, is at odds with the conventions of the church. That is, the Internet is anonymous, individualistic, and lacking leadership. So how does the church use the Internet without falling victim to these things?
One thing I didn't cover in my piece is the philosophical idea of "technology AS religion". Journalism has a hard time with philosophy: it's often boring, the ideas are abstract, and for every philosophical argument that says one thing, there are two that say the opposite.
Still, technology starts to make sense as a religion if you think on it hard enough.
Have you ever "seen" the Internet? Touched it? How do we know it exists?
Is the Internet omnipresent? Omniscient? Or is it we, the ones who conceptualized the notion of the Internet, really the ones who allow it to exist?
What if everyone stopped believing in the Internet?
Or what about the laptop I'm pecking away at right now? I don't know how it works. I just know that it does. I can't see what the computer is doing under its plastic cover, all I can see is its effects. How do I know there isn't someone in there, pulling stings and urging me to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?
Have you ever anthropomorphized technology? "It's not cooperating with me." "I can't get it to work." "It ate my disk." And so on.
If technology is a god, what kind of god is it?
Probably a vengeful god.
What I can say for certain is once people start actively worshiping technology, (praying, sacrificing goats, etc,) it'll make one hell of a news story.

On Internet Reporting

How does one write about the Internet? He asked, rhetorically.
It’s fair to say that the majority of whatever target audience you’re writing for knows what the Internet is, and what you can use it for. But when you get into the area of Internet culture, where do you start?
I came across these difficulties in writing an article about memes for “Ink”. Your average message board patron, even if they haven’t heard the term “meme”, will at least grasp the concept. They will have been inundated with “LOLcats” and been “Rickrolled” more times than they care to mention. They may have even created a “Demotivational” or two.
But as widespread as the internet is, relatively few people have waded very far into the black intellectual wasteland that is your average internet forum or blog. Few have the patience, let alone the will.
This is a common problem in any topic you write about I suppose. But the demographics of the Internet don’t really follow any predictable pattern. As British computer science academic Garry Marshall writes in his paper “The Internet and Memetics”, “Virtual communities are not structured in the same way as real-world communities. Constraints of geography and status do not come into play: what matters is a common interest.”
In other words, the demographics of traditional media don’t conform to Internet demographics. So there’s no way I can assume that ANY demographic knows what I’m talking about when I say “LOLcats” or “Rickrolling”.
The super-geek in me wants to talk about the implications of memes in regards to Internet culture; something which is seriously under-examined. But if I skip definitions and examples of memes, it’s like trying to teach somebody chess strategy when they don’t know the rules.
It's one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" things. Regardless of what I do, a section of the "Ink" readership is going to feel either patronized or lost.
One more thing about Internet reporting: the “best” source for this topic is really Wikipedia. Though I can already fell the scowls of professors everywhere, I will only say that the “experts” on Internet culture are exactly the kind of people that would take the time to write a Wikipedia article in the first place.
You won’t find an expert on the history of the ORLY owl on any faculty list in any university in the world. And even if you could, why bother? The Wikipedia article on that subject will tell you exactly the same thing. In researching the meme piece, I read an article from a legitimate news organization that actually quoted Wikipedia.
Okay, it was FOX News. But still…

“O brave new world! That has such people in't!”
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest, (presumably talking about internet forums)