Bringing Creativity and Intelligence Together

CBC Columnist Neil Macdonald wrote an interesting column about the impact of the U.S Presidential Debates on the outcome of the election that is happening in the next couple of weeks.  According to Macdonald, the President’s lackluster performance is bad news for how he will fare on polling day.

While Mr Macdonald makes some pretty interesting points, he completely misses the boat with respect to the debates: they don’t matter in terms of swaying people’s vote.  All through the debates, it has been pointed out repeatedly by many people that, at the late stage of this campaign, the proportion of the ‘undecided’ in this election is extremely small.  People already have decided who they’re going to vote for.  The task for the last  weeks up to election day will be getting out the vote.

I contend that Obama could have wiped the floor with Romney: everything from the 47% comment (a hari kari comment if I’ve ever heard one), his position on Iraq and his exceptionally wooden performance in debate #2. Further, I suspect that Obama held back on the debates, especially the first one.  The fact that Obama never used Romney’s ’47% comment’ in the first debate is proof enough.  Any first year university debater would have been able to expand upon that one quote to destroy Romney.  They would have had to sweep up his ashes after that debate, the burn would have been that big.

The reason I believe that Obama held back was to energize his organization.  If he had won and the polls showed him with a strong lead, his supporters may decide to stay home content with the notion that Obama was a shoe-in.  Now that it’s a horse race, everybody believes that the vote they cast will be a make-or-break for Obama’s re-election.  People are scared and fear is a tremendous motivator.

And to get all ancient on you, Sun Tzu would also agree that to motivate your troops, you need to ‘burn the boats’ after you make your landing invasion and create a ‘killing ground’. On  Killing Ground, your army has nothing left to lose.  With his life on the line, a soldier will fight his hardest, take the most risks, and be at his most dangerous.  Sun Tsu counsels that you should intentionallly place your troops on killing ground.  The only way home is through victory.

Like Sun Tzu, the Obama campaign realizes that it is not the leadership that gets presidents elected, it is the soldier/campaigner in the trenches.

I remember the Green Party Campaign of 2004 where we needed to garner 2% of the vote to be eligible for public funding.  Had our supporters thought that this would be easy or a sure thing, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the vote out that we did.  Because we had an uncertain yet specific goal, we were energized to go to extraordinary lengths to win, from the grassroots to the leadership at the top.

And when I was the Alberta Organizer, I was also asked to be the candidate for Calgary Center North despite the fact that when the election was called, I would be forced to support the 27 other Alberta campaigns to the detriment of my own.  However, my campaign team told me, on writ drop, that it was no longer my job to get elected, it was theirs.
To sum up, by Obama’s intentional lacklustre performance in the debates, he has created a situation where his victory is no longer assured.  This will motivate his campaign organization to extra effort, instead of taking his win as foregone conclusion.  This is especially necessary in the final weeks of the campaign in an election where the majority of people have already decided who they’re going to vote for.

I’ve always been a big fan of zombie apocalypse fiction.  Not necessarily the Walking Dead, but the fast zombies as popularized in the movie, 28 Days Later.  The associated print fiction such as World War Z and the Zombie Survival Guide not only give practical tips on how to survive a Zombie Apocalypse, but how to survive almost any disaster.  It only remains for someone to come up with a live action game where they can match their wits against the shambling machinations of the undead.

On April 21, 2012, the first playtest of Apocalypse Wars occured at Nose Hill Park.  The Apocalypse Wars Group is attempting to run a charity event based upon the struggles of an intrepid group of humans entering a zombie-infested area where an airplane crashed containing the last known antidote to the zombie infection.  They need to retrieve it or die trying.

Members of the Calgary Outdoor Club and members of the Apocalypse Wars executive ran three scenarios that tested out timings, equipment and props used.   We received extremely favorable feedback from participants who who throughly enjoyed the experience and expressed a strong interest in being involved in the first public Apocalypse Wars in August 2012.

Outside of this event, I’ve always been a proponent of combining exercise in the form of a structured contest or game.  When you’re busy thinking about your next move, or your very survival, you’re thinking less about how tired you are or how sore your muscles are.  You dig deeper.  You work harder.

Also, the stories that arise from this game are quite funny as well.  For example, we experimented with having an open container of water to be the antidote which needed to be located and brought back to the human base. 

Without being spilt.

While being chased by zombies over broken ground.

Let’s just say that a misstep happened and most of the antidote flew everywhere.  And after an erudite string of profanities, the human player saw that a zombie player was laughing at her.

Hell hath no fury like an antidote-dropper scorned.  She flung the remainder of the antidote at him, catching him full across the chest.  Grabbing his chest in a dramatic fashion, he asked,  ”Does this mean I’m cured?” 

 “No, it just means you’re an a**hole.”  she replied tartly.

Currently, I’m working on the rules for a more generic game that includes 6-10 different scenarios and set ups with extra rules to make each game variable and unique.   Basic guidelines are also being developed to try to ensure the safety of participants.

Playtesting begins in Calgary on May 27th and people interested in participating can register to play through the Calgary Outdoor Club (free to join!) or by contacting me through this website.

It’s always a great thing when a plan comes together.  In this case, a close friend of mine, John Tebbutt (aka) the Video Vulture, published in Calgary’s Premier Arts and Culture publication, ffwd , agreed to take on an entirely different medium for his column: a live and lively presentation.

Speaking at the Endeavor Art Gallery, Tebbutt spoke on the subject of the homicidal artist archetype, a person who kills, not for money or love, but for Art.  It was a presentation in keeping with the Halloween season and very entertaining to boot.

At first, I thought that the ‘artist killer’ archetype would not be very common.  But when Tebbutt starting to list and describe the movies in which this archetype appears, I was impressed.  You can read his article in ffwd here.

It is rare that we ever talk about movies in broad terms like genre, archetype, theme or thesis.  The ideas covered in the articles by Tebbutt transcend any one movie and begin to touch on deeper topics like culture, perception and prejudice.

For example, in his article, Tebbutt observes, “Artists are supposed to be eccentric anyways.”  My question would be: how do we know that?  Given that many of us might not have had a personal connection to an artist, how did we come to think that artists, as a group, are eccentric?

Right.  Media, mostly in the form of movies and television inform our perception of what the world is like.  Further, we probably also take cues from these media to model our own behavior in selected roles.

It is for this reason that groups such as women, ethnic and religious minorities are well justified in their concern for how they are portrayed in the media and, more specifically, in movies and television shows.  It is far too common to see, for example, Muslims commonly portrayed as terrorists in movie and TV shows, and then see people generalize that all Muslims are terrorists.

When I meet people who hold this particularly erroneous conviction (reinforced by confirmation bias), I ask them if they know who perpetrated the deadliest attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11.  If they don’t, I tell them.  Timothy McVeigh, an ex US soldier from New York  — as white and as American as they come.

All in all, I think there is something valuable in what John Tebbutt writes every week and has has written every week for over 10 years.  Perhaps in the not-to-distant future, we may see a book from his writings.

Wallyball is starting up again starting September 12, 2011 and games have been posted on the Calgary Outdoor Club website.

As last year, there will be both All Levels and Advanced games played at 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm every Monday and Thursday at Trail Courts in Calgary.

In addition, there will be a wallyball league playing every Friday night from 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm.  These games will be competitive with scoring and team standings  recorded over the 2011 September – December season.

Please follow the link below to read the basic rules for wallyball.  They have been condensed from the Official Wallyball Rules from the American Wallyball Association.

One Page Wallyball Rules

On May 15, 2011, I organized a partnership between the Calgary Outdoor Club (aka the COC) and the Atmosphere Store that was a rousing success for both groups.  This event illustrates the importance of how setting goals, preparation and open communication are essential to any successful event.

I was approached by Lonnie Taylor, Assistant Manager of the Atmosphere Store in Calgary to partner in an event where Calgary Outdoor Club members would be invited to a special evening where they would be entitled to 25% off of all regularly priced items and 10% off of all sale priced items in the store.  Similar offers to other sports groups in Calgary had met with disappointing results.

In a second meeting with Lonnie and Jeff Scherer, the Store Manager, we determined that if 100 or more Calgary Outdoor Club members attended, then the event would be considered to be very successful.  As the representative for the Calgary Outdoor Club, it was important that the Atmosphere Store have the aedequate staff to effectively serve the people who arrived.

The event was posted on April 25 and the response from the Calgary Outdoor Club was strong with over 30 people registering in the first 48 hours.  I kept the Atmosphere management team apprised of not only the number of registrants, but also their demographics (gender, age range).   In addition, I communicated regularly with COC attendees, encouraging them to ‘pre-shop’  and/or get pre-fitted for the items they planned to buy on the day of. 

The event was hugely succcessful, with 168 COC members attending and purchasing close to $20,000 worth of merchandise in 2 hours.

There is a tasty bit of rumor going around concerning the unrest in the Middle East.

According to the Febraury 23 broadcast of the CBC radio program   ’As It Happens’, online copies of Gene Sharp’s online book, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation ( in Arabic translation ), has been floating around the Middle East for the past few years.

Some people would say that the tactics used by demonstrators across the region bear similar resemblances to similar uprisings in Eastern Europe: they occupy symbolic locations of their respective cities; they establish tent villages; and they refuse to leave until they achieved their principal goal — toppling the dictator. And, perhaps most importantly, they avoid violence, even when provoked.

This idea  that these demonstrations are, in fact, the result of an organized plan following a concrete and proven strategy is a perspective that has not been front and center in the news media.  Perhaps this is a case of the image being taken as truth.  Chaos is taken to be spontaneous disorganization when what we are seeing is, in fact, it is the intentioned result of a specific strategy planned over the space of years.

From Dictatorship to Democracy: a Conceptual Framework for Liberation was initally published  in 1993 in the Khit Pyaning (The New Age Journal) the request of exiled Burmese dissient U Ting Maung Win, but because Sharp didn’t have a background on the political situaton in Burma, he wrote a general prescription that identified weaknesses of dictatorships in general.  Since that time, that essay has been revised and simplified into a  final work that is less than 100 pages.  It condenses the collective experiences of 40 years of struggle against dictatorship into a practical manual of action.  The brevity and simplicity of this book has enabled it to be translated into over 25 languages and distributed widely via the Internet.

The thesis of this book itself is quite simple: how does one overthrow a dictatorship?

After exploring and rejecting the options of armed opposition, guerilla warfare and intervention by foreign powers, Sharp goes on to explain a dictatorship in terms of the Chinese parable of the Monkey Master:

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by Kent Krall

I don’t agree with your article that wallyball is  a better game than volleyball.  It’s like comparing Canadian and American football.  It is a different game that allows people of all ages and athleticism to get involved in sports and thoroughly enjoy being active.

The skill level it takes to play volleyball inhibits beginners from joining volleyball teams or drop-ins because they’re embarrassed by their lack of it, or feel they impinge on the enjoyment of the others by their inability to keep the ball in play.  Beginners in wallyball immediately have fun because it’s easier to keep the ball in play and their lack of skill isn’t as detrimental.  However, even as a skilled player, you can still reap the rewards of having those strengths.

They can both be played by all levels, but it is more conducive to bringing out beginners to play wallyball by pointing out that it doesn’t take as much skill to have fun.  Obviously the more people that play a sport the more popular and credible it becomes, so let’s get more beginners out.  I even think you should rent three courts and have a tournament.  There must be around 100 people who have played your drop-in games.  Eventually you could form a league that you won’t have to babysit every night, and just do the draws and coordinate the bookings and fees.

I’m back in Regina and playing in a league.  At one time, there were at least 400 teams in the city playing at two courtclubs.  Unfortunately a venue with 8 courts, with leagues 5 nights of the week, closed down, and not due to lack of interest.  The other had 6 and was bought out by Gold’s Gym and reluctantly allotted only 3 courts to the leagues. Anyway, I digress.

Another point is that in volleyball  beyond the recreation level, each player has a position and skill set- spikers, setters, passers.  Often the only players working up a sweat are the best spikers and setter.  Everyone else is waiting around to flail at a return to pass to the setter.  In wallyball,  everyone is much more involved due to the constrictions of the court, the speed of the game, and the fewer number of players.

Now you tried to compare the skills necessary and argue that it takes more skill to play wallyball.  I disagree, but I do believe it takes different skills that make it unique and exciting in comparison.  Of course one of the obvious skills that is the same, is the ability to spike the ball to the floor via the shortest distance to avoid any chance of a play on it.  The volleyball court offers a much larger area with a backline at 16′(?) from the net compared to 10′(?) for W.  The 6 players are also further apart than the 4 in wallyball.  The ability to angle a spike directly to the floor in wallyball must take greater skill.  Of course this varies with the net level and I believe the net height in wallyball is equivalent to intermediate play in a volleyball court.

As for the skill of setting a ball.  If a person has a hitting diameter of 4′ of net in front of them, setting to that area from across a full-sized volleyball court is much more difficult than in a wallyball court where you are generally within 8 feet of all team members at any moment.  The angles, distance and trajectory are all less.  Thus, pinpointing a set, even if the ball is spinning, isn’t as difficult to master.  However, don’t discount the separate ability wallyball takes to read and utilize the walls for angles, spin and transfer of acceleration.  That is what makes this game so exciting.

Simply put, the basics from volleyball that we have all learnt in school enable everyone to instantly enjoy playing a ‘new’ sport like walleyball without a steep learning curve.

As a player of both styles of the game, and I do think of them both as the same game (see my remark on Canadian and American football).   I believe the better your skills become, the more likely you’ll gravitate towards volleyball as your preferred game.  The skills required at a higher level provide a sense of satisfaction once you’ve excelled beyond the beginner level.  If you are a die-hard volleyball enthusiast, what a great way to get people interested in your sport.

There you go, some feedback.  I’ve been playing this game off and on for over a decade.  I still think it’s every bit as fun to play as the first time I played it.

Over the past few months, many of my volleyball-playing friends have pooh-poohed my organizing wallyball for the Calgary Outdoor Club.  They believe that wallyball wasn’t a ‘real sport’ and had no place in pantheon of court sports.

They could not be more wrong.

After playing wallyball for the last 2 years, I can attest to the fact that the game is a great deal faster and more intense than volleyball.  The reason that the sport doesn’t receive the attention it deserves is because it is played inside of an enclosed area where there is no place for spectators to watch and witness the skill and intense play of wallyball.  However, because wallyball is the newcomer to the sports world, it’s up to wallyball to prove its superiority over volleyball.

For those not familiar with the sport, wallyball is volleyball played on a racquetball court.  The word ‘wallyball’, in fact, is a contraction of its original name, ‘wall-volleyball’ or ‘rebound volleyball’.  About 80% of the rules and 100% of the skills of volleyball are immediately applicable to wallyball, with a small portion of new rules to take into account the smaller playing area and walls.

” … one could say that the ‘scoring area’ of wallyball is significantly smaller than volleyball, making it harder to score points.  As a result, rally times are extended, leading to a more challenging workout and greater speed of play.”

Let us assume that, when we compare the two sports, the competing teams are intermediate or better.  They are able to effectively bump, set and spike reasonably consistently.  While beginners do play volleyball and wallyball, sometimes their lack of skill decreases the level of play and intensity for both sports.  However, unlike wallyball, volleyball tends to eliminate evern fairly experienced players through the use of the ‘killer serve’  — a serve so fast that any return attempted by the beginner knocks the ball out of play.

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Have you ever been intimidated by the sheer volume of art you get subjected to when you go to a museum?  Do you find that you don’t have the attention span for an entire theatrical performance?

Fret not, for the Art Walk in Calgary is for you!

The Art Walk is a monthly event held in conjuction with First Thursdays, the Calgary art community open house.  It will help you see and digest bite-sized portions of various art forms without leaving you feeling full.  Participants walk from place to place sampling tasty morsels of what the city has to offer.   Dishes  can be as prosaic as a  quick art gallery tour or be as unusual as  backstage tours of Theatre Calgary’s set building and costume creation shops  or as eclectic as  a presentation on how Holt Renfrew envisions and makes manifest its Christmas window displays.

The Art Walk is a creation of Art Proctor who created it as a vehicle to expose people to the plethora or visual and performing arts installations in Calgary; a kind of a cultural smorgasbord.   Once a person has sampled from a wide variety of cultural offerings, they are encouraged to go back and experience more deeply those events and installations that have struck their fancy.

Art Walk: February 3, 2011

This Art Walk was the first on that was scheduled and executed by me.  While Art provided advice and encouragement, the February 3 Art Walk was very much my baby.  And it went splendidly!

“It was fascinating to learn how technology, instruments and music have interacted and influenced each other in the past.  Fascinating.”

All in all, it  was quite awesome with approximately 25 people showing up.  We started at the Municipal Building and did a tour of public art installations located throughout City Hall, the Municipal Building, the Calgary Center for the Performing Arts and Olympic Plaza.  We were guided about by Anna, who was quite knowledgeable about public municipal artists and their benefactors.  It is a policy in Calgary that any building project over $1 million must donate one percent of its building budget to the creation of public art.  Sadly, there was virtually no information about any other art that we encountered during the tour that was not publicly owned by either the city or the province.  Apparently, The Calgary Core Group is in the process of adding it into their tours and will be available soon.

It ended up that we picked up some other folks from this tour group who were pretty impressed about where we went from there!

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Back in October, I decided that I needed to round out my evening exercise schedule from just wallyball and yoga.  Looking around, I saw that Duane Verity was running Dodgeball on behalf of the Calgary Outdoor Club.  The event attracts between 30 and 40 participants who play on four randomly determined teams in round robin and championship competitions.  Winners receive medals and the accolades of their peers and losers  nurse their dreams of revenge.  And all standings and photos are posted for posterity.

“… the prospect of evading a firing squad of 7-10 death spheres is enough to give one pause.”

Now, when I think about dodgeball, my memories go back to elementary school where it was either ‘kill or be killed’ on the court.  We played with one or two balls and hit players would move themselves to the ‘prison’ behind their opponents.  With throwers behind you and in front of you, you could face a serious crossfire.  You had to be fast, agile and be willing to sacrifice the body to make the dodge.

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