Tag Archives: bishop's university

The Gumboot Community Expands!

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Deutschland ist wunderbar!

Deutschland ist wunderbar!

Yes, that’s right. Just like Starbucks, we’re expanding exponentially. That means more voices and more time for John and I to hit the pavement and promote the Gumboot’s unique offering in the wilderness of the world wide web (isn’t alliteration wonderful). In fact, in the coming weeks watch out for more and more new contributors coming online (and if you want to be a contributor – make sure to email us!).

In the meantime, I’d like to belatedly introduce our newest correspondents, Peter Joerdell, Jim Clifford, and Katie Burns. Our newest correspondents hail from Germany and Toronto expanding the Gumboot community from Vancouver to a global network of community correspondents.

Peter’s a nifty fellow. I’ve known him for years – since my young formative years at Bishop’s University. I’ll always remember sampling the apple wine (at least I think that’s what it was) – which felt like rocket fuel going down – as Peter and I along with three other Germans cruised in a dirty pickup truck through the back country dirt roads the rural Eastern Townships. Peter and I were stretched in the back, bundled up tightly and clinging to old Mauser rifles, a shot gun and some sort of tricked out sub-machine gun (yeah – in retrospect I’m not sure if it was legal either). The whole scene had a vague Stalingradish feel. It was cold, wet, and dirty; except we weren’t there to shoot Russians, but tin cans. A preferable endeavor particularly considering tin cans don’t shoot back.

Peter Joerdell - our German Correspondent.

Peter Joerdell - our German Correspondent.

Since then Peter, like all of us, has gone on to new and exciting things. He’s now a journalist and PR guy who works as a freelancer on top of it all. He lives in Germany in the north, where they don’t like Southerners and dress in black and are inordinately serious.  The Gumboot managed to snare him after offering more than the New York Times and Washington Post were able to shell out for his journalistic talents. Sorry Arthur Sulzberger – maybe next time.

Peter will be providing the Gumboot’s fabulous audience with a fresh new perspective on the Fatherland and the countless communities that connect it. We’d highly recommend you consider checking out his first piece on Oki, a local German punk who lives in a train station and keep tuned to his next article coming up this Friday. On behalf of the whole Gumboot staff and audience (with the exception of the “real Pete”) welcome to the team Peter.

Jim and Katie – well, I need not say much more than they are both awesome and (almost always) reliable.

You can find out more about Jim here and more about Katie here.

That’s right – they were such hot stuff, we had nailed them down for a Get To Know Your Community segment early on. Who says John and I can’t spot rising stars?  Turned out they were so blown away by our site they begged us to come on as full time correspondents. At least that’s the story I’m planning on telling anyone who’ll listen.

In the spirit of this post I’d like to elaborate on these two characters to explain my own personal connection to their awesomeness.

Sure they look a little shifty - but who isn't?

Look at that cute couple.

I found my love of cooking from Jim and my interest (it’s not full blown love yet unfortunately) in baking from Katie Burns. For them, I traveled across the entire continent packing a camoflage knife bag with my favorite chef’s knife so I’d have the opportunity to whip up a tasty treat or two at their wedding several years ago.

Both of the dynamic duo bring a unique and interesting organic/sustainable/friendly-folk-in-the-city angle to the Gumboot and frankly we love em for it. Jim’s able to do all of this while he’s publishing ActiveHistory.ca – a website dedicated to expanding history into new non-academic communities. As a former history student I must say I admire this mission – one which may well be as difficult as any James Bond ever came across. On behalf of the rest of the group – we’d like to welcome you to the team!

Aboard the Editor’s Pirate Ship – Back to School

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[Editor's note: Aboard the Editor's Pirate Ship is pretty similar to "from the Editor's desk" or "The Editorial Section" of a "newspaper" (remember those, kids?) - thing is, I spend a lot of my day at a desk, so, when I get to twitblogging, it takes place on a creativity-inducing pirate ship where I can stretch my legs as I expand my mind. To you, dear readers, I say "Welcome Aboard!"]

ist2_3965048-back-to-school-colorful-child-writingAcross Canada and around the world (The Gumboot has followers from Uruguay to Uzbekistan, baby!) millions and millions of people are going back to school. Obviously, there are a lot of places to get advice on everything from school supplies to fitting in to increasing your career potential by exploring your options. Now. The highly paid staffers here at The Daily Gumboot possesses a collective expertise in a lot of things – compassionate conservatism, tennis, laundromats, pirates, existential detection, qat, scrapbooking, butter – but, in all truthiness, where we really shine is in our knowledge of education. First, almost all of us went to school at some point. Second, yours truly was raised by two teachers and has attended and/or worked in schools (high ones, colleges and universities) forever. Third, education is pretty much the only thing that’s gonna save our poor little planet; so take it seriously as you have fun with it!

Without further ado, here are five key things to think about as you head to class on Tuesday (or a little earlier, I don’t know if Uzbekistan has Labour Day or not):

1. Be Yourself. This one is simple and complicated. People who change schools or enter college or university with a clean slate are often seduced by the opportunity to re-invent themselves. And it might work. For awhile, at least. Thing is, you are who you are and, no matter how much you pretend, you will inevitably be yourself. Besides, being comfortable in your own skin – maybe even confident in it – is so incredibly attractive and magnetic that, before you know it, you’ll be the most saught-after friend in your class! In conclusion, just ask Oscar Wilde: “be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

2. Find Your Tribe. Get involved. After all, hopefully you’re going to school to become a well-rounded, value-adding person in life, the universe and everything. Start reflecting on what you value (ie. accountability, you do not pay tuition because you think the system is unfairly structured and you would like to choose where your money from hardworking night shifts at Subway goes) and what interests you (ie. pirates) and try to combine them into a fun, campus-based community (ie. The Revolutionary Pirate Club). Also try to be a bridge-builder or connector – maybe your basketball friends and your History department friends and your revolutionary pirate friends will get along and collaborate to form a larger, awesomer pan-community with world-changing potential. It all starts with finding people who give you energy and bring out the best in you.

3. Demand Edutainment. Edutainment combines education, technology, media, entertainment, and, ideally, humour in a classroom setting. Basically, it is a force of positive change that is endeavouring to blow apart the nineteenth-century paradigm of education. Your classes should be collaborative, infused with technology, personalized, and, most importantly, fun! Teachers from kindergarten to university are shaking things up in a lot of ways, so keep your eyes open for distance learning, mind-mapping, social media insta-polling, blogging, e-portfolios, digital media projects, service learning, and project-based courses. And, most importantly, if you find yourself in a classroom listening to an expert for more than an hour, start yelling. The content and style of education should be engaging, after all.

4. Write Down 101 Dream Goals. What 101 things do you want to accomplish before your funeral? What stories do you want to tell your grandchildren? What kind of person do you want to see when you look in the mirror? What do you do for fun? Backpocket COO, Cameron Herald, told me about this supercool mind-mapping exercise. No, you don’t need to map out details like your professional title, geographic location, marital status, family size, and name of your three dogs that you will have by the time you’re 34. You should, however, start identifying your core values, skills and interests sooner than later. If you’re heading into a post-secondary institution, track down their career services office and schedule an appointment in your first year. Again, by no means should you be expected to define an exact and specific post-graduatation job, but you should start thinking about what you want to do when you’re finished school. And keep this in mind. More than likely, the job you will have at then end of your post-secondary education hasn’t even been invented yet. So, maybe put “know three interesting future trends” in your 101 Dream Goals…school-bus-resized

5. Handle Your Booze. “You don’t need to drink to have fun.” My mom told me this as she packed boxes of clothes to be shipped from Vancouver Island to Quebec. Frank the Tank she is not. Little did I know how powerful and unifying this phrase would be. Because, as silly as it sounded to a hyper-masculine 18 year old, I didn’t - and don’t – need to drink to have fun. When my friends and I got heavily involved in Bishop’s University’s orientation week – which, in its hay-day, was a complete gong show of the best kind – our team/group/community motto was “you don’t need to drink to have fun.” Obviously, the boozers in the crowd laughed at our sarcasm; however, we weren’t being sarcastic, as we wanted to make sure that everyone felt included, comfortable and safe. Speaking of safe, take “booze” as a metaphor for whatever vice you put in, on or around your body.  The sooner you figure out that stories beginning with “man, I was so wasted last night…” are cool, absolutely, but only have a limited shelf-life, the more ready you will be to create positive change in the world. Still, when the time and audiences are right, start some stories with that line because, well, they’re usually pretty hilarious! And remember this line that I found scrawled in a Victoria, BC pub called the Bent Mast: “everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Students. Your brilliant young minds have never been as needed as they are today. And the world’s biggest employer is, well, The World. And She is lookinf for someone to help with a rather monumental change. There will be opportunities everywhere for you to find. Good luck. And have fun with it!

- JCH

From Weekly to Daily Gumboots

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“And so with love in their hearts, anxiety in their heads and girding in and around their loins, Vancouver’s coolest and multi/inter-dimensionally-qualified twitbloggers of the interscape take their community building project to the next level. These folks are world changers; and you should use their ideas from everywhere to build community today.”

- Barack Obama, 2009

Okay. So maybe Barack Obama didn’t really endorse the transition of the Weekly to Daily Gumboot. But, hey, embrace the creative world of magical realism, suspend belief and accept the fact that 81.2% of our facts and findings are made up. After all, we embrace it! The trick is figuring out what side of the 19.8% your interpretation of our data, sources and “research” you think is made up. Hey, at least we’re honest about our subjectivity!

gumboot copyMoving on…

Though, we really did get a glowing endorsement about our “employing” Mike Boronowski to backstop a much sexier version of The Gumboot while Kurt Heinrich and I motivate our contributors to provide daily content or suffer the consequences of punishment by catapult. And here it is:

“Kid, just because it comes out every day and because you have your own website – or whatever you just said it was – doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit.”

- My Grandma, Betty, last night on the phone

Well said, Betty. Media consumers need to be mindful of what they take-in. And, hey, there’s a lot of information out there. We here at The Gumboot think it’s important for you, the reader, to know where your information – and our ideas – come from. So, since you might not be 100% familiar with The Gumboot (weekly or daily versions)? Allow me to provide a bit of a synopsis on how we got here:

The Historical Time Line of The Daily Gumboot

5000 BC – Year 0: Egypt and Mesopotamia build communities around beer (a form of currency and central component of many herbal remedies) and either the biggest non-French example of public works projects by employees of the state or, well, slavery.

600 – 1000 AD: Romans combine entrepreneurship, militarism, butter, salt, and ham to create a variety of cheeses and proscuittos that Kurt Heinrich strives to re-create in his kitchen each and every weekend. He also defends himself and his cheese if necessary.

1491 AD: People around the world who aren’t from Europe get this really weird feeling and start to wonder whether or not it’s a good thing that their communities exist in such beautiful places chalked full of delicious natural resources.

1500 – 1650 AD: Shakespeare and some other dudes make writing cool; first blog is published in 1603 to passively-aggressively commemorate/mock King James I’s ascent to the throne.

1650 – 1724 AD: The Golden Age of Piracy provides many ideas and concepts (health, democracy, gender equality, education, environmental stewardship, business, fashion, multi-culturalism) that continue to drive our society today.

1725 AD: University of Glasgow Professor, Francis Hutcheson, creates a mathematical formula for benevolence. The very same formula we here at The Gumboot apply to each and every one of our articles.

1729 AD: Jonathan Swift writes about eating children as an effective way to deal with poor communities and a lot of people take it the wrong way. For the record, people still take it the wrong way.

1812 AD: The British musket-and-cannon their way to a draw with America, yet somehow this “war” is remembered as the one time Canada beat the US at something; our national communities have been dealing with the ramifications ever since.

1848 AD: Soccer (based on supercool Chinese foot-to-ball techniques) as we know it is invented; things get a little ridiculous in all communities but the ones north of Mexico and east/west of everywhere else.

1861: The community of Merville, BC is founded by Sir George “Gumboot” Merville, who, incidentally, got lost with his crew on their way to Cape Horn with a delivery of sheep for the Falkland Islands. Friends of sheep and people who don’t ask questions, they inserted themselves into the landscape quite nicely and built a small, but vibrant, community based on the wild mushrooms that grew in the muddy middle-region of present day Vancouver Island. In the 1920s some re-settled First World War veterans arrived and invented a bit of a different story about Merville. Still, to this day it’s referred to as “the gumboot capital of Canada” for a darn good reason. Somewhere, George is smiling.

1880 – 1987 AD: The fusion of warfare, industry and government makes killing people and destroying things pretty darn efficient. Yet, somehow, the vast majority of people on Earth found time to dance, sing, create, love, give directions to misguided tourists, and not kill each other. In fact, there are a lot of songs, poems and paintings about such things. Technology and human innovation, it turns out, are viciously and beautifully double-edged.

1988 AD: Al Gore collaborates with a Soviet spy named Sputnik, the British Post Office, some nerds at UCLA, and a supercomputer named “Dennis” to invent the Internet. Seriously.

2003 AD: John and Kurt graduate from Bishop’s University with meager writing skills, a penchant for Egyptian beer and a blossoming friendship based on history, pirates and ideas from everywhere. After their proposed Fox sitcom fails spectacularly, they go their separate ways.

2005 AD: The environment – Gaia, I think her name is – demonstrates her/its anger and fury. To quote Paul Hawken on why this might be significant, “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”

2005 – 2008 AD: Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart coin hilarious phrases like “truthiness” and “twitblogging the interscape,” while Rick Mercer and George Stroumboulopoulos combine razor wit with Canadian humility to lampoon every region of this country from Dildo, Newfoundland to Yak, British Columbia. All master the world of Web 2 before their time (maybe even its time).

December 2008 AD – the present: A descendant of Otto von Bismarck asks John what his family has ever done for the annals of history. John starts on a story of his great, great, great grandmother’s service to soldiers during the Boer War but is quickly interrupted. The question is re-framed and answered and the point is taken. After a few Egyptian beers, a game of soccer and a spirited discussion of whether or not cleeted gumboots would be good for West Coast soccer and/or the First World War, The Weekly Gumboot was born.

So that’s how we arrived at where we are today. Pretty simple. Pretty straightforward. All of it steeped in truthiness and histortical findings. Speaking of honesty, we also have a few values and ideas that define The Daily Gumboot’s mandate:

  • Keep it positive: building communities is hard when we throw stones at each other, or when/if you get hit by them (this metaphor works when it’s not a metaphor, too); focusing on what we have in common as well as finding the humour in our differences is a refreshing change from fear-mongering and finger pointing.
  • Collect ideas from everywhere: everyone and every idea deserves a voice and a venue; so, we strive to find stories about communities from all around the world – ones that are tucked away into the most obscure and unknown and distant places of this planet…like Calgary!
  • Make ideas actionable: it’s one thing to have a good idea, but it’s an entirely different thing to deliver on it; in our Five Ways to Build Community segment – as well as our interviews with community builders from around the world (or the West Coast if our funding falls gumbootsthrough) – we will provide useful tips on what you can do to build community in your, um, community.
  • Be educational edutaining: recent findings show that people learn more when they’re having fun; we hope you have fun with it as you explore our understatedly educational blog.
  • Make it fresh, snappy and sexy: this is where the “publishing witty and provocative ideas every day or almost every day comes in” part comes into play; again, Mike Boronowski gets credit for our new, sexy look.

So there it is. Thanks for taking the time to visit The Daily Gumboot. And, hey, just because we might not post a fresh twitblog each day doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stop by for a visit each day! Some of my posts might even take you a day or two to consume and digest…

Stay classy. Keep it positive. And, most importantly, have fun with it!

Your pal,

John

Editor-in-Chief