The convenience trap: What the changes at Netflix reveal about an insidious trend

by Sam Adams

Lars Von Trier said that “a film should be like a stone in your shoe,” but it increasingly seems like we’re moving toward a world in which the success of a given work of art is determined primarily by its ease of access. “Convenience” and “choice” are the watchwords of the digital era, in which content must be instantly accessible and as quickly digested, lest consumers flit off to some more welcoming destination.

With its recent decision to sever its streaming video and DVD-by-mail services, charging a flat fee for each that would raise prices on existing services as much as 60 percent, Netflix unceremoniously shoved its customers toward a future in which hard copies are a thing of the past. (As Jim Emerson pointed out in a post on his Scanners blog, the company has made internal moves to forcibly separate its two-pronged business by removing users’ ability to manage their DVD queues from the streaming app.) Streaming music has turned every laptop into a world-class listening booth, and Netflix’s DVD service allowed anyone with a mailbox access to many of the greatest movies ever made. But as we come to expect and even rely on near-instantaneous access, we risk unconsciously downgrading anything that isn’t so ready at hand. Because of my profession, people confess to me that it’s been years since they saw a movie in a theater, while friends post requests for Netflix Instant recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, apparently content to limit their options to whatever’s streaming right now.

Netflix’s rationale was a simple cost-benefit analysis: Given the runaway success of its streaming service—which now comprises nearly a third of the country’s Internet traffic during peak hours—it could no longer offer dual plans as a mere add-on. But CNET’s Greg Sandoval put forth an intriguing alternate theory, one that does a substantially better job of encompassing the entirely predictable negative reaction to the price hike: What if Netflix wanted to kill off its DVD business, the way Apple killed off the floppy drive? There’s a reason the company’s not called “DVDs by mail.”

It’s common knowledge that Netflix’s streaming offerings are patchy and unpredictable, light on new releases and heavy on catalog obscurities, and that a movie or a TV series you’re in the middle of watching can disappear overnight. But what if Netflix wants disgruntled customers? Sandoval speculates that Netflix assumes most customers will drop DVDs in favor of streaming, and studios will be faced with two choices: either make more titles available via streaming, or accept that Netflix’s customers will just watch something else. It’s already trained its members to wait four weeks, during which new movies are available to buy but not to rent, in order to expand its selection of Instant titles. So why not assume they’ll wait forever, or failing that, move on? Search for Drive Angry, and Instant helpfully suggests you watch Kick-Ass instead.

In essence, Netflix is gambling that its customers are less concerned about watching the right movie than watching right now. What if it’s right? Let’s leave aside issues of quality control, the fact that Netflix frequently makes movies available in the wrong aspect ratio, or that the quality of streamed video is noticeably poorer than DVD, let alone Blu-ray. Let’s focus purely on availability, what you can watch and what you can’t. As of this writing, Instant offers several off-brand collections of Charlie Chaplin’s early shorts, but none of his features. There are two titles apiece for Jean Renoir and Akira Kurosawa. You can watch Todd Haynes’ Poison and Far From Heaven, but not Velvet Goldmine or I’m Not There. (Despite having been released on DVD, Haynes’ Safe is unavailable even for rental.) You can stream the moving gay-rights documentary Word Is Out, but not the pioneering queer films of Kenneth Anger. Derek Jarman’s Edward II is there, but not his masterful The Last Of England.

As critic and historian Dave Kehr is often moved to point out, the prevailing myth that “everything is on DVD” is hilariously wrong. Every time a new technology takes over, a chunk of film history gets left behind. Movies that were mainstays of undergraduate film classes have been marginalized as colleges and universities zero out rental budgets and build new classrooms that only allow for projection from digital sources. Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread, once a pivotal text for teachers seeking to illustrate the potential for deception inherent in the documentary form, has all but drifted out of the conversation, replaced by more easily accessible examples.

The services offering access to a bottomless library of content continue to multiply, but for myriad reasons ranging from licensing restrictions to tangled chains of custody, these services are critically flawed. Spotify’s great, unless you want to listen to anything Hüsker Dü recorded before its major-label debut. Would you trade New Day Rising for the Black Eyed Peas catalogue?

Netflix and Spotify offer untold lifetimes’ worth of content, enough to keep your eyes occupied and your ears filled until the end of time. But there’s so much they lack: out-of-print albums with no rights to license, or great LPs as yet undigitized; movies unavailable and unreleased. Savvy (and legally flexible) Internet users know how to get a hold of many of them, but that too requires an inconvenient amount of effort, to say nothing of the get-up-and-go required to actually leave home and patronize your local cinematheque (if you’re lucky enough to have one, as fewer and fewer people are).

The consequences of exalting ease above all else are twofold. There’s pure economic marginalization, through which less-popular titles are pushed aside. (See this post advancing the sketchy but troubling prospect that Netflix may be moving away from smaller documentary releases, which could have a disproportionate effect on boutique distributors.) And then there’s the knock-on effect through which ease of access bleeds into ease of viewing. If you’re not inclined to put forth the effort to get yourself in close proximity to a given artwork, will you be willing to expend the mental energy necessary to understand it? How much more likely are you to bail on, say, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, when with a few clicks of your remote you can be watching a favorite episode of Friday Night Lights?

Earlier this summer, a New York Times Magazine article touched off a debate about “cultural vegetables,” singling out “long” movies that in most cases are shorter than the average football game. We carry around unspoken assumptions about what’s long and what’s short, what’s easy and what’s hard, and when those assumptions calcify, we may no longer be aware they’re there. The populist idea that art should be accessible to the public has been engulfed by the notion of art as commodity, readily available, no waiting.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, Milos Stehlik, who founded Facets Multi-Media, the DVD distributor of such vegetable-flavored works as Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue and Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó, recalled, “For me, a great film always took effort. Sometimes I traveled far or sat on the floor of basements watching rickety 16mm or beat-up VHS copies. But it was the film that mattered, not having it delivered faster than a pizza, with the click of a button.”

Putting aside the I-walked-two-miles-barefoot-in-the-snow aspect of Stehlik’s recollections, what he’s describing is an environment where the viewer—not, please, the consumer—is fundamentally subservient to a work of art, in which it is our responsibility, and often our pleasure, to come to the work rather than expecting it to come to us. After all, shouldn’t art be inconvenient, if not in the sense of being difficult to access, then because it forces us out of our comfort zones, requiring us to reckon with its way of understanding the world? It may be a stone in your shoe, but if you don’t get off the couch, you’ll never know it’s there.

The Beach Boys Prove Summer Is Forever

by Mitch Albom

It was 50 years ago this summer that a couple of guys named Mike and Brian were sitting in a California garage, noodling with a song. As Mike recalls, the song "didn't take that long. Just a few minutes." When you read the lyrics you believe him:

Surfin' is the only life

The only way for me.

Now surf, surf with me

Bom Bom Dit Di Dit Dip

Bom Bom Dit Di Dit Dip...

Mike and Brian, along with two of Brian's brothers and a family friend, took the song to a local record company, which had wanted them to do a folk tune a la the Kingston Trio.

Instead, they came up with "Surfin'."

And the Beach Boys were born.

I don't know which stuns me more: that the Beach Boys have been around 50 years, or that I know their first hit. But there is something undeniable about their body of music, something that says there is music, and there is iconic music. Why do songs like "California Girls," "Wouldn't It Be Nice" or "Fun Fun Fun" still sound fresh, still make people smile, still throw a beam of sunshine over the coldest day?

It must be more than the chords, right?
More than surfers

"It is pretty remarkable," Mike Love admitted to me last week, "that people still love the songs we created lo these many years ago."

Love and the Beach Boys, in their current incarnation, were coming to suburban Detroit for an annual concert tradition. Of course, most of the original members weren't there -- including the semi-reclusive Brian Wilson or his now-deceased brothers, Dennis and Carl. But at this point, even the Beach Boys name is an institution, and people come out to sing along with songs that hearken to a more innocent time -- and an endless summer.

"Dennis, myself and Al (Jardine) were all surfers when we got started," Love said. "In high school, if we heard on the radio that the surf was up, we might miss a few afternoon classes."

Ironically, once they came up with "Surfin'," the band pretty much retired their boards. They've been touring every summer since 1962. As songs like "Surfin Safari" and "Surfin USA" became increasingly bigger hits, the men singing them were increasingly landlocked.

Still, the feelings their music evoked were as sparkly as sunshine refracting diamonds on the ocean. In time they sang about cars ("Little Deuce Coupe," "409"), about school and hanging out ("I Get Around," "Be True To Your School"), about the innocence of youth ("When I Grow Up To Be A Man," "In My Room") and eventually, even psychedelic spirituality ("Good Vibrations").

But through it all, one thing was constant. Their sound was unique. And you always hummed along.
A musical genius

I am -- obviously -- a huge Beach Boys fan. I admire the genius of Brian Wilson's arrangements, his harmonies, his innovative use of sounds and instruments. That he did this on such simple infrastructure as "Dance, Dance, Dance" or "Help Me, Rhonda" only makes it more impressive.

There is no shame in being serious about music and serious about the Beach Boys. Even the Beatles were envious of their work.

Still, there is something about finding out that this band of once shaggy golden boys is now 50 years old, or that Mike Love is in his 70s. It gives you pause.

In "The Picture of Dorian Gray," the lead character never ages, but a hidden portrait of him shows the decay of years.

In real life, the Beach Boys have it better. Their hairlines and birthday cakes may tell one story, but their music tells another. It tells the same remarkable tale it did the day they took a garage-created tune and brought it to a studio.

Sometimes, magic only takes a few minutes. And if you're lucky, it can last for decades.

Illegal immigrant has no right to government health care, court rules

by Adrian Morrow

The Federal Court of Appeal has denied an illegal immigrant coverage under Canada's universal health care system, a precedent-setting decision that could discourage others from travelling to the country to obtain free treatments.

The case relates to Nell Toussaint, a Grenadan national who entered Canada in 1999 as a visitor and has lived in Toronto since then. Suffering from a kidney ailment, by 2006 she was too ill to support herself. Among other ailments, she suffered from blood clots, diabetes and tumours.

Facing hospital and other medical bills she could not pay, she applied to become a permanent resident in 2008 so she could qualify for health care coverage in Ontario. However, she did not pay the fees for her applications, so they were not considered.

She applied for the federal government to pay her health care bills under a 1957 Order in Council that extends coverage to anyone who is being handled by the immigration system. The government refused and she twice appealed the decision, arguing that her rights to life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been violated. Her second appeal was turned down in a decision released Friday.

Judge David Stratas, writing for the three-member Federal Court of Appeal, argued that the federal government was not obliged to pay her medical bills because, as an illegal immigrant who had not paid the fees to have her application processed, her case was not being handled by the immigration system. The Order in Council, it found, was designed to help only people who enter the country legally.

While the court agreed that Ms. Toussaint suffered from severe medical problems that could lead to her death if left untreated, it found that the lack of medical coverage was her own fault since she had not applied to legally immigrate until she had lived in Canada for nearly a decade.

“The appellant by her own conduct – not the federal government by its Order in Council – has endangered her life and health,” Judge Stratas wrote. “The appellant entered Canada as a visitor. She remained in Canada for many years, illegally. Had she acted legally and obtained legal immigration status in Canada, she would have been entitled to coverage under the Ontario Health Insurance Plan.”

He further ruled that the court should reject her appeal in order to defend the country's immigration process and avoid setting a precedent.

“If the appellant were to prevail in this case and receive medical coverage under the Order in Council without complying with Canada’s immigration laws, others could be expected to come to Canada and do the same,” he wrote. “Soon, as the Federal Court warned, Canada could become a health care safe haven, its immigration laws undermined.”

Her legal saga may not be over yet: another court has ruled the government must consider waiving the fees on her residency application, which could restart the immigration process. If she is successful in qualifying as a temporary or permanent resident, the government of Ontario could end up paying her health care bills.

Link

Groundhog Day : Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry

By Bill Wyman

What happened to the music industry over the last 10 years or so was a lot like the plot of The Hangover. Bad judgment and self-indulgence producing chaos, pain, blinding sun, dim but lacerating memories … and you wake up to find there's a tiger in your hotel suite. It's been more than 10 years since compression technologies and ever-faster online speeds started making it easy to move media around online. That's the development that put the plot in motion. For music fans, what was first the slow agony—and then the thrill—of emailing a song to a friend evolved with ever-increasing speed into a world in which we can easily swap discographies of 10, 20, even 50 or 100 albums.

What that meant for the music industry was painful: Its sales are about 40 percent of what they were 12 years ago, and there are even worse metrics than that. (There's a chart on this blog post, for example, which demonstrates that people are buying about one-fourth as many CDs as they were in the 1990s.)

Throughout, chaos reigned: The fall of the CD. The rise and fall of the DVD; the rise and fall of Napster. The rise and rise and rise of the file-sharing networks and cyberlocker sites. Thousands of legal attacks by the record industry on file-sharers; the coming of Netflix; the opaque future of streaming services and cloud storage. Indeed, Steve Jobs recently announced Apple's foray into cloud storage. The idea is that we'll be able to match our iTunes libraries—music for now, but eventually video as well—to online repositories, where they will be accessible to all of our computers, TVs, phones, and pads. (I'm not buying it, but that's a subject for another time.)

But note that this has come a decade after the introduction of the iPod. While many of the industry's humiliating Hangover-like pratfalls took place in public, a lot worse was going on behind the scenes. The labels knew something was happening, but they didn't know what it was, and scrambled wildly—and spent that way, too—to get a piece of it. (Remember Warners and Imeem?) It took more than 10 years of rights wrangling, much of it done personally by the irresistible Jobs himself, with the recalcitrant and stubborn levels of the music industry, from artists and their agents and managers, to the record industry with the various labels and corporate parents, and then songwriters and their various rights organizations, most of which resisted technological change in every knuckleheaded way possible.

Speaking of which, look at the New York Times today. Hollywood and the cable industry are teaming up to penalize illegal downloaders by taking away part or all of their Internet access after five or six warnings, the beginning of a new Whac-a-Mole game that, even if successful, will just see the downloaders move to new and more secure ways to move media around.

Right now, in fact, the movie and TV business looks a lot like the music one did in the early 2000s. And as we've seen, that decade didn't work out too well for the labels. So it's worth looking at the situation and wondering how things are going to fare in the TV and movie world in the decade ahead. It can all be summed up in one single sentence. I'll get to that in a minute.

The situation for watching a movie or a TV show these days is a mess. Here's a case study. If I want to watch some old episodes of The Office, for example, I have an extraordinary slew of options. But there are two problems with this. For one, I don't want a slew of options. I really just want one. And, as for the second, they're all hard to use or incomplete in one way or another.

DVDs, once so sleek and cool—you don't forget your first director commentary—are now unwieldy and a drag to use. You have to sit there waiting for the things to load, chugging like the digital equivalent of a Model T. Then you get all the FBI and Interpol warnings, several of them, in various languages. Go ahead, push the "top menu" button on your remote all you wish and curse the screen the way your father did his old console TV, but you're not going to be taken anywhere. The studios deliberately program the warnings so they can't be skipped. At some point, the disc allows you to start navigating menus to see the episode you want … and then you do it all over again, including all the legal warnings, when you go to the next disc.

Now, this is all for a product you as a consumer have taken the time and effort to pay and bring home to your house. In other words, you bought the thing legally, but the studios still petulantly want you to hear them whining about piracy, and have no evident interest in giving you control to use it as you wish.

So let's move to cable. When I used to subscribe to DirectTV, my DVR box had an enormous hard drive. As I watched my favorite shows—three or four on NBC, a lot more on HBO and Showtime, just for starters—I just archived the current season, along with scores of movies and the churn of daily and weekly news shows I keep up on. Then I moved, and am now back stuck with Cox, the Yugo of cable service.

My new DVR holds so few shows I thought the hard drive was damaged originally. They weren't. It was just the (sub)standard Cox offering. It holds now about 20 shows, and a few movies, and is basically useless in that it fills up every few days and starts deleting older programs. And, of course, there's no way to archive the shows I want to keep or add my own extra hard drive.

But what about "on-demand," you ask? Cox's is dismal. Press the on-demand button, wait a few minutes and you can page through something that looks like an in-room viewing interface in a Marriott from the 1990s. (There's no search.) Eventually you'll find the NBC archive, and then eventually a few episodes of The Office. Click a few times and wait patiently, and you'll find each episode comes with un-fastforwardable-through commercials, generally from movies of NBC sister-company Universal. Most of the time, there are only two, and they are each repeated about four times during the 22-minute episode. Most recently they were a mirthless preview of Little Fockers and an already-forgotten, simpering Zach Galifianakis movie called It's Kind of a Funny Story. Watch two episodes of the show and in the space of an hour you will have seen each of those commercial eight times. This is a less than optimal viewing experience.

Now NBC's not the only network, of course. HBO, too, has some on-demand shows available on Cox's system. But only some.

Since I'm an HBO subscriber, I have another venue for seeing old HBO shows that I want to watch or series I want to catch up on. The network provides it … on the Web. HBO now has a service called HBO Go. The site contains a fairly big chunk of the network's history. There's no Larry Sanders, but it's got most of the tony stuff—the complete Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and Sex and the City, for example. This is great, and the next time I'm in NYC maybe I'll be the cool guy at the Spring St. subway station watching old episodes of Carnivale on his Nexus One. But I really want these TV shows available where I actually, um, watch TV, which is on the couch in front of the TV set. That, I can't get, and it seems odd.

So then there's Netflix. (Note that I'm now on my fourth media financial outstream—first cable, then DVDs, then premium cable, and now an additional $23.99 a month for Netflix.) Netflix has a fairly impressive library of film and TV shows available on DVD. But of course you have to wait a couple of days to get something (I'm including the time it takes to mail your other disc back), and there are the gaps for films and shows that just aren't on disc. (Like the Australian Wilfred, for example.) Irritatingly, Netflix doesn't provide a way to request titles, either.

Now, Netflix also has a limited number of films and TV shows on its on-demand streaming service. Netflix streaming works fine. It's fast and responsive. The only problem there is that the Sony PS3 through which I access it has become a supreme annoyance. Even before its recent hacking problems, the PS3 had become incredibly pushy, suddenly demanding I sign onto something called the PlayStation Network before I could watch a Netflix video. (This could have something to do with my move to Cox, I'm not sure. But I also don't care. I just want to watch a movie on Netflix.) In recent months the thing also began greeting me with an annoying Netflix sign-on screen instead of just signing me in. The sign-on screen includes a little check box that lets me tell it to sign me onto Netflix automatically. It shows me this little check box, in fact, no matter how many times I've already checked it.

Once the PS3-hacking issue got underway, a new phenomenon resulted: After being forced to use that annoying Netflix sign-on screen, I would then be told I needed first to go sign on to the PS3 network … which was of course down. I would be routed to a screen that said I couldn't in fact sign on to the PlayStation Network, and was told to push a button to go back to the previous screen … which told me I couldn't sign on to Netflix until I signed onto the PlayStation Network. This merry-go-round continued for a few more iterations before the thing gave up and let me onto Netflix. Imagine the fun for parents who just want to show their kids Toy Story 3.

Anyway, once you manage to access Netflix, the first six seasons of The Office are available for immediate streaming—but not, for some reason, the current season.

At this point I don't really want to spend the time to explain how annoying the PlayStation store's video offerings are to use. (You can get some Office webisodes there.) Or to talk about another video HD service on the PS3, called Vudu, offering "Top Quality High-Speed Streaming Movies on Your PS3™ System!," which sounded exciting and was intriguing right up to the point where nothing happened when I clicked on its icon. Or to discuss how difficult it is to get Hulu Plus up and running. That service lets me see the current season of The Office and finally makes the show's complete archive available to those who are not exhausted. (Who said TV isn't mentally stimulating?) It's $7.99 a month, too, or the fifth payment plan so far, but who's counting?

(Apple TV, you ask? Netflix works better on that, of course, but it has other problems. There's no disc drive, so I can't replace a DVD player with it, much less a Blu-ray, or play data discs the way the PS3 lets me. And there's no convenient USB port for a thumbdrive, which the PS3 also has.)

This frustrating and pointless process can be repeated with any TV show you wish, or any group of director's films or any genre. Some parts of it are available here under these circumstances, some are available there under those. Some in this place, some in that, and some not at all. And the availability can change without notice.

The trouble facing the movie industry right now is the same one the music industry had to confront 10 years ago. This is the summing-up sentence I referred to above:

The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally.

Now, I recently obtained, through sources I will not divulge for obvious reasons, a single DVD disc with 22 episodes of The Office on it as data files—a complete season. (Since I already own all the DVDs and got the disc just to make a journalistic point, I hope the courts will be lenient.) I can play it on my PS3 and I can take the disc with me when travelling to watch on the computer.

This obviates the need for four or five DVD discs. The quality isn't high-end HD, but it's quite good. And of course I don't get the extras like the deleted scenes, though I'm sure I could if I wanted. The PS3 has a Bluetooth remote, much better than standard-issue cable-company ones, that responds to commands with lightning speed. And there are no FBI or Interpol warnings.

Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn't just free. It's better.

Here's one more example. Vuze is one of the most popular bit-torrent clients. I don't know when it happened, but some months ago I noticed some new icons under the video menu on the PS3. "Vuze on Macintosh" read one. "Vuze on PC" said another. I poked around, and finally figured out that the Vuze program on my computers had added a new feature, one that that lets you play on your TV the video sitting on the connected devices on your home network. The feature had installed itself automatically on the PS3. That's a little scary, I guess, but compare this to how, right after I downloaded Hulu Plus, I started it up … and was told I had to download an update. Now I just toss any video I have on my computers in the Vuze PS3 folder and I'm good to go.

It's not perfect, but it's incredibly useful. It's also thoughtful, in the sense that the program anticipated what people might need and made it happen. (It also plays all of the various video codexes, unlike Apple TV, which handles just the limited ones its QuickTime player is comfortable with.) There are no terms and conditions, no Interpol warnings, and no sign-on screens, and best of all there is no artificial divide between this season and that of some TV series. It's all there when I want it. Why should I go back to on-demand or Netflix?

In the music industry throughout the 2000s, the record labels were hampered by a number of things—their own lack of technical knowledge, the sprawling and discordant number of rights holders, corporate paralysis in the face of change, or just, in some of the more enlightened operations that tried to ride the wave, some bad guesses about where the technology was going to go.

(They were also stymied by a failure of imagination brought on by decades of corrupt machinations, short-term bottom-line thinking, and the arrogance of having milked a lot of money out of their ability to resell their product in different formats to each new generation of consumers.)

Anyway, because of all these things, the music industry, when it began to feel the effects of the technological change coming, doubled down on stupid. The labels didn't get together to co-opt this new rough beast. When Napster appeared, they sued it instead of working with it and creating a central repository for its product. When kids started file-swapping on other venues, the labels adopted the scorched-earth policy of suing its own customers, even though it wasn't offering most music legally. And then when Steve Jobs showed the labels a way to get their product to consumers easily and smartly, they insisted on digital-rights-management software, which again made the legal product less desirable than the illegal and led to years of stunted progress before they finally gave up.

It seems plain that the 2010s are going to be the decade of video. There are good reasons, looking at matters in the short term, for the movie and TV industries not to get their acts together. There are genuine economic forces at work that prevent it as well. (For one, the principals involved need to accept what the music industry never did—that the overall value of its product, which had been propped up by its monopoly control of it, has been considerably and permanently lessened. It's a lot to ask.)

But we can see what didn't work for the music industry. Will Hollywood figure it out? I doubt it. For one, the power of the parties involved, the complexity of their interrelationships, and even the internecine battles playing out inside some of them dwarf those of the music biz. Consider: Sony, Microsoft, Apple and Nintendo; the TV hardware makers (including Sony); the studios, each with corporate parents and international interests (Sony again); theater chains; TV studios (Sony again), TV networks; stars, writers, directors, and their unions; ancillary players like Netflix, Amazon, and the like; and others I'm forgetting. (And then add antitrust regulators here and, even more importantly, in the EU into the mix.) Try getting that crew of misfits and miscreants to agree on anything.

Another factor mitigating against them proactively fixing the problem: The stakes are in a sense lower, in that theater exhibition, a big chunk of the studios' income, won't be affected, for now. The exhibition field can be thought of as the movie industry's equivalent of the live-concert industry in music, but one where all the money doesn't go to the artists. But: The increasing quality of the home-viewing experience, particularly for adult-appeal films, is I think an underappreciated iceberg ahead. And the free money coming from innovations like 3-D and IMAX showings, however evanescent their appeal, are for now covering up a lot of softness in the industry.

Another bright spot, from the industry's point of view: The machinations needed to use illegal video are presently a lot more complicated than they are for illegal music, particularly for segments of the audience that are older than, say, 30 and don't play video games. But that's a phenomenon whose prevalence decreases with every passing year. Younger people grew up manipulating their game consoles and computers. They won't have the problems fortysomethings today have.

If the studios were smart they'd go to the mat and create a massive one-stop shop for TV and movies, find a price point they can live with and then set programmers loose to make the thing as easy to use and ubiquitous as possible. Instead they've been wasting their time strong-arming the cable companies to help them on a new crusade against illegal downloaders—an unwieldy process that doesn't address the root problem and won't work.

Where have we heard that before?

I'm not saying that using illegal media is right. And of course it's free—the studios can't do anything about that. But does it have to be easier?

No—and until something is done about the ease of use, the film and TV studios are going to live out a script very similar to the one the music industry just acted out. I know the name of that movie. It's called The Hangover 2.

Why the courts must decriminalize prostitution

by Kirk Makin

Want some action? In most of Canada, sexual services are just a click, a phone call or a short stroll away. Some are overtly marketed as nude massage parlours or body rubs. Other hide behind coy euphemisms: holistic centre; shiatsu; gentlemen's spa.

After choosing from a small selection of attendants at one such establishment, Toronto's Studio 409, one is led into a room with soft lighting, a shower, lots of towels and a selection of oils. The attendant lists a smorgasbord of services that include nude massage, fetishes and body sliding.

Body sliding?

“It can mean just about anything,” the attendant explains, laughing.

And the same is true of Canada's prostitution laws, a legal regime riddled with arbitrariness and hypocrisy. Enforcement is wildly uneven, when it takes place at all.

Yet the current laws are a masterpiece of coherence compared with the chaos that will break out if the Ontario Court of Appeal this month strikes down several central provisions of the sex-trade laws.

The court has set aside five days the week of June 13 to hear a joint provincial and federal appeal of last year's lower-court decision that invalidated prohibitions against maintaining a brothel, communicating for the purposes of prostitution or living on its avails.

That decision hasn't come into effect because of the pending appeal, but all year its broader implications have stirred up commotion and heated debate. The big question is: Has the moment come when Canada is ready to decriminalize prostitution?

A ruling that the law is unconstitutional would bind all Ontario judges and spark immediate legal challenges in other provinces that would cite the decision.

Many experts believe that if the Crown appeal fails, the Harper government will not venture into the morass of prostitution law, “for the same reasons as they avoid dealing with abortion,” says Mariana Valverde, a criminologist at the University of Toronto: “There is just too much to be lost and not much to be gained.”

Theoretically, prostitution – exchanging sex for money – has long been legal in Canada. But in practice, virtually any method of buying or selling sex is prohibited. It's Canada's half-baked compromise to avoid all-out confrontation between two camps that split long before the 2010 decision: One faction, led by religious groups and rural Canadians, objects to any loosening of the laws that govern sex work, fearing decriminalization could lead to underage prostitution and human trafficking. The other favours liberalization, provided there is no increase in crime and public nuisance. Whenever the two sides clash, committees are charged to review the laws. They report back months later with sensible proposals. These are ignored, and the daisy chain begins anew.

That is, until now. The horrific Robert Pickton murders in B.C. raised the country's awareness of prostitutes' vulnerability, and now the Ontario court's scrupu- lously written decision is at last providing an opportunity to sort the problem out.

If you listen to the people most affected – the prostitutes – it becomes clear that the rational thing is to destigmatize the oldest profession, to help it be practised more safely and sanely, as the normal part of Canadian life that, like it or not, it is.

With the midafternoon sun streaming through a living-room window of her condo, 17 floors above Toronto's east end, Victoria Love (her trade name) lives a comfortable, middle-class existence after 15 years in the business. But she has to be cautious. “I skirt around the law,” the slight 32-year-old says. “I go to places to meet my clients, and nobody knows what is going on. There is a lot of vulnerability, but I'm very careful to keep myself from running into legal problems.”

Such great care, and good fortune, have prevented Ms. Love from getting hurt or coming onto the police radar. To avoid bawdy-house charges, she does only outcalls. And she avoids any customer who raises her suspicions.

Others, she knows, are not nearly so lucky. “There is an incredible variety of experiences in the sex industry,” she says. “For some, the laws created conditions that led to horrific forms of violence. When the communicating law came into effect in the 1980s, we began to see missing women and severe forms of violence.”

Forced by the communication law to assess a potential customer hurriedly before getting into his car, street prostitutes are the ones most likely to end up beaten or dead. A 2006 study by Parliament's standing committee on justice and human rights found that at least 79 prostitutes were killed from 1994 to 2003. It concluded, as most researchers have, that street workers face the greatest peril.

Sex workers of all kinds seldom seek help from the authorities because their boyfriends can be charged with procuring or their children apprehended by child-welfare authorities. “Whether you're being arrested or not, your name is in the system now as a criminal,” added Katrina Pacey, a lawyer with Vancouver's Pivot Legal Society. “You will forever be marked.”

Thus, current law not only fails in its goal of preventing street prostitution, it also has forced sex workers of all types to operate in perilous isolation, afraid to reach out for help.

If the court throws out that law and Ottawa doesn't act, by default the mess will end up in the hands of municipalities. “They should be preparing pro-actively for this, but they aren't,” Prof. Valverde says.

She predicts that municipal politicians will panic and pass hasty measures that drive sex work further into the shadows – literally, figuratively and dangerously.

Policing paradoxes and social stigma

Just before the communication law was introduced in the 1980s, a number of prostitutes The Globe and Mail interviewed on Toronto's Church Street described a beat cop they had dubbed the Sperm Whale, based on his willingness to turn a blind eye in return for sexual services.

Today, it is rare to see a prostitute on Church, but a wary relationship endures between sex workers and the police, who are expected to be both pursuers and protectors.

The illegality of the sex trade helps the police in giving them a window through which they can watch out for underage boys and girls as well as human trafficking. Advocates say that while some police are understanding and see the arbitrariness of the law, others are judgmental and harsh.

“The vast majority of enforcement efforts have always been to target street-based sex work because it is the most visible aspect of prostitution and that's where the complaints are,” Ms. Pacey says. “It has made them incredibly vulnerable.”

Still, it isn't law enforcement that tends to irk sex workers the most. It is the constant need to lie about their vocation. It is having to stomach the frequent public indifference when a hooker is murdered. It's the sense of being an untouchable caste.

As Ms. Love says, “I'm a prostitute, which is a very stigmatized and devalued identity.”

The feminist debate always comes down to this: Are these women victims of exploitation or empowered women with a right to decide how they use their bodies?

The Crown argues that what sex workers need most is not decriminalization, but programs to help with addictions or mental problems and to aid them in developing work skills.

But, to the attendant at Studio 409, it is all about controlling one's own destiny. A full-time office worker who was attracted to the idea of stepping outside her workaday life, she works two evenings a week servicing men: “I get to meet a lot of interesting people,” she says. “And it gives me money to go travelling.”

Emily van der Meulen, a public-health expert at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital and a strong advocate of reform, says she looks at prostitution as analogous to a young person settling for a burger-flipping job at McDonald's. “Maybe he would really like to be the CEO of Apple,” she says. “Unfortunately, Steve Jobs isn't going to give up his job. But it's not for me to say that the kid made a bad choice by working at McDonald's.”

Her point is that “choices are always constrained by social context. … Given those constraints, sex workers see this as the best possible avenue for them to make a living.”

Ms. Love, for her part, scoffs at the idea that she is a victim. “Those debates are so old to me,” she says. “People have sex in apartments. Well, sometimes, they have sex in an apartment and leave money on the table when they leave. What's the difference?”


A wave of international reform

Most countries that have decriminalized sex work did so after deciding that, since it will never disappear, it only makes sense to take a pragmatic leap to tolerant regulation. In the past decade, Australia, New Zealand and Germany have all embraced decriminalization, acknowledging that their own versions of the it's-legal-but-you-can't-do-it game were not working.

Meanwhile, Sweden went in a unique direction, based on a conviction that sex workers are victims of exploitation. Today, Swedish prostitutes are never charged or prosecuted – their customers, however, can be.

In Canada, politicians have repeatedly ignored cries for reform, leaving it to York University law professor Alan Young finally to persuade the judiciary to step in. During the week-long hearing last year before Madam Justice Susan Himel of the Ontario Superior Court, Prof. Young and the Crown brought out a parade of sex workers, criminologists and international experts arguing for or against decriminalization.

Judge Himel concluded that the communication law compels sex workers to operate in dark corners at great risk to their safety; that outlawing brothels forces prostitutes to work in solitude; and that the pimping law precludes them from hiring drivers or bodyguards to enhance their safety, as well as making it legally dicey to live with boyfriends or family members.

The reaction from sex workers was all over the map. Some cherish their anonymity and independence from state scrutiny, red tape and taxation. Legal reform would cost them at least some of that.

But there would be many payoffs. For example, labour protections would allow sex workers to participate in employment insurance and have recourse against brothel owners who force them to work unpaid overtime or unsafely. As in Germany, they might even form unions.

“Right now, some escort services … expect you to be on call 24/7, and you are fined if you miss a call,” says Susan Davis, a Vancouver prostitute-activist. “We have booking girls who work totally on commission, so they will send you anywhere. We really need to be covered by labour law.”

As for the canard that decriminalization will lead to neighbourhoods being overrun with leering prostitutes and unruly johns? As Judge Himel took pains to point out, police have ample charges at their disposal to deter public nuisances.

What's more, many politicians seem unaware that the Internet has profoundly changed the nature of sex work, reducing the need for prostitutes to troll for business in public. Studies have shown that the bulk of them now work in massage parlours or with escort agencies or communicate by phone or online with clients.

Only the most desperate remain on the streets. But there will always be some. “For as long as there is extreme marginalization, poverty, drug addiction and untreated mental health, there is going to be street-level sex work,” Ms. Pacey says.

Conversation needs sex workers' voices

Regulations drafted without the input of sex workers are prone to fail, Ms. van der Meulen says. They are the real experts on the realities of their trade, and any approach that didn't have them on board would create a new black market. Vancouver has already led the way, installing sex workers on boards and committees that influence municipal policy.

Ms. Davis attributes the city's changed attitude to the lingering trauma of the murders by Mr. Pickton. “No one here was unaffected,” she says, “so there is a desire to try something new.”

Under decriminalization, municipalities would find other tools – zoning provisions, licensing fees, surveillance and health rules – to regulate sex work. In large centres, brothels would probably be licensed.

But Gillian Abel, a public-health expert at New Zealand's University of Otago, warns that sex workers will shy away from any system that forces them to reveal their names and personal information. Brothel owners must be the ones who are subjected to background checks and divulge financial information, she says.

For those who don't think Canada is ready for a decriminalized sex trade, consider this: For 25 years, the country has existed without a genuine abortion law. Midwifery has gone from being an illegal activity to one that is regulated and widely accepted. Medical marijuana has become legal and Vancouver has even created a safe injection site for heroin addicts.

However controversial, they all reflect a move toward pragmatic accommodation rather than top-down control.

The sex trade, meanwhile, is everywhere, with its existence causing minimal public disturbance. If the political will to recognize and cope with that fact is too weak, then it will have to be done in the courts.

Gazing out at Toronto's skyline, Ms. Love muses about how the Ontario Court of Appeal may change her world. “There are fear-mongers who try to get people's knickers in a knot,” she says. “They say: ‘Oh, there's a prostitute next door!'

“Well, there are prostitutes next to everyone. We are just going about our business.”

10 Ways You Waste Money on Your Car

By Jerry Edgerton

With gas bills putting a crimp in your budget, you don’t want to be wasting money on other car expenses. But many car owners do just that — either spending more than needed on maintenance or putting off work that will cost more later.

To be smart about your car, you need to do the right amount of on-time maintenance — while resisting mechanics’ pitches for unnecessary work. “With advertising that emphasizes maintenance-free cars, people may have the idea they don’t have to take care of them,” says George Sadowski, education manager at the Norwood, Mass., campus of Universal Technical Institute, a leading provider of training courses for auto mechanics.

But while neglect doesn’t work, neither does overspending. From Sadowski and Michael Calkins, manager of the AAA program that recommends repair shops, here are 10 ways you may be wasting money on your car.

1. Changing oil every 3,000 miles. A relic of a bygone era, this guideline is often promoted by dealers or repair shops eager for business. Instead, read your owner’s manual and follow the manufacturer’s recommendation for oil-change intervals — it’s often 5,000 to 7,500 miles.

2. Using premium fuel unnecessarily. Don’t pay this higher cost unless your owner’s manual says premium fuel is “required.” High-performance engines like those in Corvettes and some luxury models do really require it. But if premium fuel is just “recommended,” you can still buy regular. Michael Calkins of AAA takes this suggestion to heart. “I have a Nissan Murano that recommends premium,” he says. “But it runs fine on regular.” At recent national averages of $3.78 a gallon for regular and $4.04 for premium, that’s a savings of about $4 every time you fill up a 15-gallon tank.

3. Failing to change your air filter. “If you have not changed your air filter by about 40,000 miles, it is probably clogged and hurting your gas mileage,” says George Sadowski. That MPG penalty could be as much as 10% to 15%, he estimates. So if your mechanic recommends a fresh filter after about 25,000 miles, say yes.

4. Failing to check the brake pads. Most mechanics will raise this issue periodically, but you should suggest it if not. Getting timely pad replacement can help you avoid later (and much more expensive) repair to the brake drums or rotors, Sadowski advises. Replacing the pads should cost less than $150.

5. Buying mileage-boosting additives and devices. On auto racing shows and other sports programs, ads are nearly constant for oil additives or devices — like magnets on the fuel lines — that will supposedly improve your car’s mileage. “I’ve never seen any good scientific study proving that any of this works,” says the AAA’s Calkins. “They come out of the woodwork whenever gas prices go up.”

6. Tune-ups for your engine or air conditioning. Another relic of a bygone era, this is still a popular promotion to drum up business. “Modern engines are constantly being tuned by on-board computers,” says Calkins. “And as for air conditioning, if it is blowing cold air, it is fine. If it isn’t, get it fixed.”

7. Changing coolant. Mechanics or dealers will often say you need to have the engine coolant flushed out and replaced. That’s only true if you have plenty of miles on it. Modern coolant — you’ll know it because it’s usually brown or light red – is engineered to last five years or 50,000 miles, says Calkins. That’s about double the lifespan of the old-style green coolant.

8. Ignoring your check-engine light. This amber light on your dash, which in some cars says “service engine soon,” indicates a problem with the fuel or emission system. A malfunctioning oxygen sensor, often the reason for the light, can hurt your gas mileage. (See 5 Questions to Ask Your Mechanic.) And an out-of-kilter fuel mix, if ignored too long, could harm the engine.”You could wind up with a $1,000 repair job instead of what could have been a $150 job,” cautions Calkins.

9. Buying expensive performance tires. When it is time to replace your tires, the dealer rep or salesman at the tire shop may try to convince you that you need the super-grip performance tires that come with sports cars and other high-performance vehicles. But they can sometimes cost twice as much, Calkins notes, and because they are made of softer rubber, they often do not last as long. And let’s get real: Are you driving an Indy track or circling the mall looking for parking?

10. Paying for built-in navigation. If you are buying a new car, taking the factory navigation system can cost $2,000 or more. Calkins points out that most smart phones now have navigation options that work just as well and carry free updates of their maps, unlike the built-in systems.

You can’t control the price of gas. But by paying attention to your maintenance schedule and doing just enough — but not more than you really need — you can keep from wasting money on your other automotive costs.

A long-buried release, possible Beach Boys reunion give reasons to Smile

By Ryan Snyder

There`s a 1971 Beach Boys recording from a Fillmore East show with the Grateful Dead where Carl Wilson, having just concluded “Good Vibrations” to uproarious applause, sends his gratitude to the song’s authors. “It sure was nice of Mike and Brian to write that song,” he said. The Mike in question was lead vocalist Mike Love and the Brian, of course, was the band’s mercurial mastermind Brian Wilson. The band was but 10 years old at that point, but had already endured myriad internal problems, and the show with Jerry Garcia and company was to serve as rehabilitation for the sagging hipness. Another 40 years later and the Beach Boys may be primed for another shot of cool.

It’s true that the peachy keen, aw-shucks demeanor that Carl Wilson espoused in innocent stage banter typified the Beach Boys then as much as their infallible harmonies and revolutionary lyricism did. At the same time, the growing ideological rift between the militantly teetotaling Love and the psychedelically curious Brian Wilson came to be the band’s albatross. Through numerous legal, professional and interpersonal complications, The Beach Boys are on the verge of two historic milestones: a potential 50th anniversary reunion and the definitive release of the Smile recordings, the creative work said to be the tipping point for the band’s creative differences.

While the album that’s come to be known as The Smile Sessions is finally seeing the light of day after several excruciating misfires over the decades, plans for a 50 th anniversary reunion of the surviving band members are a little less evident. Brian Wilson, the only living Wilson brother, has offered contradictory quotes as to his potential involvement in a reunion over the past two weeks. The first, more encouraging statement came in a piece published on May 16 by BBC 6 Music where he said simply, “I’m considering it. I don’t know yet, but I am considering it.” He followed that in a teaser published 10 days later by the Village Voice, referencing the same report published by BBC 6 and rollingstone.com, “I don’t know anything about that. I don’t really [have a relationship with the other members] right now, and I’m not really interested in them.”

In a recent interview with YES! Weekly as the Beach Boys prepare to make the inaugural performance at Greensboro’s new White Oak Ampitheatre, Love expressed confusion over the conflicting reports before striking a similarly guarded, but more conciliatory tone.

“I heard of an interview where he said I’m retiring the Brian Wilson thing and next year I’m going to be a Beach Boy. Who knows?” Love said. “I can’t speak to what he said because I wasn’t there, but I think we’re all open to doing stuff together again.”

In regards to the anniversary, there are a couple of formative events worthy of observation according to Love. One being the release of their first single “Surfin’” in the late fall of 1961, and the other being their first time promoted as the Beach Boys, which occurred on Dec. 31 of the same year. As for his ideal observation for the Beach Boys’ golden anniversary would be, Love could only express his support for a performance involving the surviving members.

“It makes a lot of sense.

There’s a lot of interest in that,” Love said. “I can only say that I’d be open to it and it could be fun, fun, fun.”

Those surviving members, of course, are Love, Wilson, rhythm guitarist Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston, who joined the band in 1965 as an onstage replacement for Wilson. Johnston currently tours with Love as a member of the Beach Boys, while Jardine has found success fronting his own solo band. Jardine made a brief return to the Beach Boys earlier this year, signifying that animosities resulting from suits brought against him by Love and the estate of Carl Wilson over the touring usage of the Beach Boys’ name may have quelled.

As for Love, he’s charioted the Beach Boys since the 1998 death of Carl Wilson despite sharing corporate ownership with Brian Wilson, who otherwise became preoccupied with work outside the band. While Love made scattered attempts at a solo career that ultimately proved less fruitful, he believes a reunion would still be a part of the conversation had he opted in favor of his own work.

“Its possible, I don’t think anyone would have thought that the Buffalo Springfield would be out touring today, that’s for sure, especially after taking about 35 years off,” Love said. “Anything’s possible in music, as long as you have your health and your chops, and you haven’t overdone it with drugs or alcohol.”


Long the spearhead of the clean-and-sober faction within the band, Love has almost gone out of his way in the past to project an image of temperance and mildness. He brought his friend John Stamos on as a drummer during the actor’s peak years as Uncle Jessie on “Full House” in the 1980s, and still references him as “America’s Favorite Uncle” in conversation. While he says he was disapproving of the drug use that began to consume Wilson during the Pet Sounds era and increased during the recording of Smile, Love acknowledges that Wilson was always the most important member of the band. At the same time, however, he expressed his hesitance in joining him artistically as his unbridled creativity was capable of taking the band off into places for which he wasn’t prepared.

“The only exception I took was that I wasn’t involved in the lyrical part of it, and the lyrics are a little far-fetched and obtuse for me because I have a different style of writing and a different thought process,” Love stressed. “But that’s been misconstrued by some as to say that I didn’t like the Smile album — and that’s absolutely not true. I never said that, but I did take exception to some of the lyrics. What I took exception to was the insanity of that time, all the drugs and everything like that. As far as the music is concerned, that part of it is incredible.”

This obviously isn’t the first time Love has said he was only opposed to the lyrics — which Smile co-writer Van Dyke Parks has called “revisionism” — Love remains adamant about his stance. Some evidence suggests that it may simply be time that has softened Love’s stance on the band’s more psychedelic music. He spoke glowingly of the Carl Wilson song “Feel Flows”, a song from the album Surf’s Up which itself was salvaged from the Smile recordings.

“My son went away to school a while back and he said one of his friends heard ‘Feel Flows’ with a solo by Charles Lloyd,” Love said. “This friend of his comes back and says that ‘Feel Flows’ is the best song he’s ever heard. It’s not really well known, but it’s a phenomenal recording.”

He says he hasn’t heard what the project as it will be released on Aug. 9 sounds like, but he also doesn’t see it as a weight is about to be lifted from the band’s collective shoulders. He says that “Wonderful” shows Brian Wilson singing at his best, with the rest of the band offering some of the most complex harmonies of that period, and described “Heroes and Villains” as simply “dynamic.”

“I think people will listen to it, and some will get their mind’s blown and others will think it’s too far out there for them,” Love said. “But I think everyone will find something they’re going to like on it.”

Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle

By Howard Falcon-Lang

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonization of Mars.

The tiny tropical island of Ascension isn't easy it find. It is marooned in the ocean, 1,600km (1000 miles) from the coast of Africa and 2,250km (1,400 miles) from South America.

Its existence depends entirely on what geologists call the mid-Atlantic ridge. This is a chain of underwater volcanoes formed as the ocean is wrenched apart.

However, because Ascension occupies a "hot spot" on the ridge, its volcano is especially active. A million years ago, molten magma explosively burst above the waves.

A new island was born.

Back in 1836, the young Charles Darwin was coming to the end of his five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no naturalist had gone before.

Aboard HMS Beagle, he called in at Ascension. En route from another remote volcanic island, St Helena, Darwin wasn't expecting much.

"We know we live on a rock, but the poor people of Ascension live on a cinder," the residents of St Helena had joked before his departure.

But arriving on Ascension put an unexpected spring in Darwin's step.

Professor David Catling of the University of Washington, Seattle, is retracing Darwin's travels for a new book. He told the BBC: "Awaiting Darwin on Ascension was a letter from his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow."

"Darwin's voyage of discovery had already caused a huge sensation in London," he explained.

"Henslow assured him that on his return, he would take his place among the great men of science."

At this fantastic news, Darwin bounded forth in ecstasy, the sound of his geological hammer ringing from hill to hill.

Everywhere, bright red volcanic cones and rugged black lava signalled the violent forces that had wrought the island.

Yet, thinks Professor Catling, amid this wild desolation, Darwin began to hatch a plot.

Out of the ashes of the volcano, he would create a green oasis - a "Little England".

Darwin's great buddy was Joseph Hooker, the intrepid botanist and explorer.

Only a few years after Darwin's return, Hooker was off on his own adventures, an ambitious slingshot around Antarctica aboard HMS Erebus and Terror. Mirroring Darwin's voyage, Hooker called in on Ascension on the way home in 1843.

Ascension was a strategic base for the Royal Navy. Originally set up to keep a watchful eye on the exiled emperor Napoleon on nearby St Helena, it was a thriving waystation at the time of Hooker's visit.

However, the big problem that impeded further expansion of this imperial outpost was the supply of fresh water.

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker's visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's dad was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, norfolk island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

Back in England, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution were busily uprooting the Garden of Eden.

But on a green hill far away, a new "island Eden" was being created.

Yet could Darwin's secret garden have more far reaching consequences?

Dr Dave Wilkinson is an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island's strange ecosystem.

He first visited Ascension in 2003.

"I remember thinking, this is really weird," he told the BBC.

"There were all kinds of plants that don't belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened," he said.

Wilkinson describes the vegetation of "Green Mountain" - as the highest peak is now known - as a "cloud forest". The trees capture sea mist, creating a damp oasis amid the aridity.

However, this is a forest with a difference. It is totally artificial.

Such ecosystems normally develop over million of years through a slow process of co-evolution. By contrast, the Green Mountain cloud forest was cobbled together by the Royal Navy in a matter of decades.

"This is really exciting!" exclaimed Wilkinson.

"What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error".

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

However, to date, scientists have been deaf to the parable of Ascension Island.

"It's a terrible waste that no one is studying it," remarked Wilkinson at the end of the interview.

Ascension Island's secret is safe for years to come, it seems.

Inside a toxic hellhole, Iron Mountain Mine

by Peter Fimrite

A strange chemical smell lingered in the stifling heat as a group of environmental scientists groped in the darkness through one of the most polluted places on Earth.

The Iron Mountain Mine, outside of Redding, is a hellish pit where acid water sloshes against your boots, greenish bacterial slime gurgles out of the walls, and stalactites and stalagmites of acid salt, copper and iron jut out like rusty daggers.

"You don't want to splash this stuff," said Rick Sugarek, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's project manager for the Iron Mountain Superfund site. "This is the concentrated stuff."

The water - so acidic it could dissolve fabrics and burn skin - lapped against the rubber boots of the scientists, toxic-substance specialists, geologists and EPA officials who slopped in the dark toward the source of the toxic stew that created what experts describe as the "world's worst water."

"It's really kind of creepy," said Jane Vorpagel, a staff environmental scientist for the California Department of Fish and Game, who was seeing the slime-dripping cavern for the first time.

The recent mine tour was, in part, an attempt to familiarize Jared Blumenfeld, the Environmental Protection Agency's recently appointed regional administrator, with the worst of the 128 Superfund sites in his district.

But it was also a lesson on the extent of the damage humans are capable of inflicting on their environment and the innovative methods of resolving those problems.

The EPA has taken extraordinary measures to neutralize the toxic mixture that polluted the Sacramento River and its tributaries for more than a century.

The flow of pollution, which killed thousands of fish and did untold damage to the river habitat, is largely being held at bay and the damage has been contained. But the journey through the vile dungeon of the mine showed clearly that the danger will always remain.

Iron Mountain, about 9 miles northwest of Redding, was once a majestic peak topped with red iron rust that suggested to miners in the 1860s that a little digging might reveal valuable copper.

A company called Mountain Copper established a 4,400-acre mine in the 1890s and began to supply sulfuric acid to refineries in the Bay Area. It became the largest copper mine in California by the turn of the century, and a small city of laborers lived on the mountain. Twenty cavities the size of office buildings were drilled into the rock.

The mining operation turned to rubble what was originally a 200-foot-thick by 3,000-foot-long underground deposit of pyrite, the metallic mineral known as fool's gold. The destruction of the mountain exposed the pyrite to oxygen, water and bacteria that combined to create poisonous runoff.

The result was the worst concentration of acid in the world, about 500 times more toxic than any other mine.

Today, dirt roads snake over and around the mountain. Treatment plants, holding ponds and dams are scattered about to catch the toxic runoff. The entire area is carved up. Rubble and large areas of bare reddish dirt pock the hills.

The primary source of the acid is inside a shaft on the side of a steep, barren hillside known as the Richmond Mine. The group that trekked into the bowels of this shaft was one of the first to ever go that deep; it included news media and other observers not directly involved in Superfund research.

Inside, the sound of bubbling and burbling is everywhere as water drips onto superheated rocks and turns into vapor. The chemical steam heats up the cavern and emits a strong odor. One visitor is told it might not be good to breathe the air there for extended periods of time.

This is what Sugarek calls "the belly of the beast," a place so hot and lacking in oxygen that it has to be pumped full of air so workers and visitors don't pass out.

The Richmond tunnel is mostly covered with a fiber concrete that protects against collapse, but the acid salts eat away at the material deeper inside, exposing rotting old timber beams. Iridescent green copper stalactites jut down from above, and sparkling black mineral deposits known as Voltaite multiply over the rock walls, much of which is made of pyrite.

The tour group wore rubber boots and gear to protect against ever-present water that is so acidic even a droplet would eat a hole in blue jeans or dissolve the stitching on boots, much like battery acid. Splashing it on bare skin would cause "exfoliation," Sugarek said with a wry grin.

"This certainly seems like the mother lode of contaminated sites," Blumenfeld said. "It is our job to learn from this and make sure it never happens again."

Over the past year, workers dredged much of the 170,000 cubic yards of copper, cadmium, zinc and iron that had flowed out of the mine and accumulated for 50 years at the bottom of the Spring Creek arm of the Keswick Reservoir. The sediments were piped up to a newly built treatment facility that separated out the solids and neutralized the toxic metals, which were then dried out and secured in pits on nearby federal land.

Sugarek, who has been in charge of the Superfund site for 20 years, said the management of toxic material will continue, but, to date, 98 percent of the toxic material has been captured and contained.

"Our main goal at the EPA was to protect the Sacramento River," Sugarek said. "A ton a day of copper and zinc used to hit the river. We have been able to reduce that to 2 percent of what it once was."

The flow from this chemical cauldron into the Sacramento River and its tributaries was devastating, EPA officials said. Before the creeping acid was contained, it was as bad for the environment as 100 oil refineries pouring petroleum into a salmon spawning stream would have been, Sugarek said.

The Bureau of Reclamation built an earthen dam in 1963 to block the steady flow of sludge, but it would often overflow during heavy winter rains and the copper and metals would get into the Sacramento River.

The mine was finally abandoned in 1966 and collapsed in on itself shortly after that, but the problem only got worse. By the time the EPA took over management of the area in the 1980s, a ton of acidic water a day was flowing into the river and the water in the debris dam was blood red from the mixture of iron and copper.

In 1988, a sudden surge of power at a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plant sent 2,000 cubic feet per second of metal-laden water flowing out of the Keswick Reservoir, turning the Sacramento River red all the way to Hamilton City, 100 miles away.

Desperate, the EPA built the Slick Rock Creek Retention Dam in 2004, which captured most of the red sludge. Now the EPA is concentrating on the leftover mess, which is expected to cost the government $200 million to manage over 30 years.

A federal court recently held the owner of the mountain, Ted Arman, and Iron Mountain Mines Inc. liable for nearly $27 million in past cleanup costs and some $30 million in interest accrued over the years. The former owner, Rhône-Poulenc, which later became Aventis CropScience USA Inc., agreed to pay the federal government $154 million over 30 years in future cleanup costs.

Sugarek said the runoff can be captured, cleaned and turned into landfill for up to 100 years if the money is available. The problem is that the toxic broth will continue pouring out of the mine for 3,000 years until the pyrite is used up or someone figures out a way to neutralize the chemical and biological reactions, scientists say.

"There is nothing that we have in the world today that solves this particular dilemma," Sugarek said. "What we can do is collect it and treat it and hope that in the next 30 years we have come up with new technology or techniques to resolve it."

At one point during the mine tour several members began edging into a cavern and were quickly alerted by EPA officials that it was not safe to go any farther. A sudden increase in temperature was immediately apparent at the mouth of this cavity.

The shaft leads into a place deeper inside where researchers recently found six unique strains of bacteria living in a bed of pink slime that are part of a little-understood biochemical cycle that devours iron, produces sulfuric acid, and creates a nightmarish broth of copper, zinc and arsenic.

There, the chemical reactions drive temperatures up to 130 degrees and the puddled water is sulfuric acid, concentrated enough to melt an aluminum ladder. Sugarek said the rocks inside this noxious horror house have been known to catch on fire from time to time.

NASA once sent a robot in - and nobody ever saw the machine again or collected any scientific data from it, Sugarek said.

Scientists at NASA and UC Berkeley have not given up. They are studying the pink slime and what they believe is a primitive form of bacteria inside the mine, a substance so unusual that it can survive in laboratory-grade acid.

It is a measure of success, Blumenfeld said, that this toxic concoction is no longer pouring into the river.

"We've come across to the other side of the mountain," he said. "It is great to see that we can get back to a place where the water again runs clear. If you can clean up the Iron Mountain Mine, you can clean up anything."

Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones

by Adam McDowell

The Ultimatum Game works like this: You are given $100 and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed.

How much would you offer? If it's close to half the loot, you're a typical North American. Studies show educated Americans will make an average offer of $48, whether in the interest of fairness or in the knowledge that too low an offer to their counterpart could be rejected as unfair. If you're on the other side of the table, you're likely to reject offers right up to $40.

It seems most of humanity would play the game differently. Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia took the Ultimatum Game into the Peruvian Amazon as part of his work on understanding human co-operation in the mid-1990s and found that the Machiguenga considered the idea of offering half your money downright weird — and rejecting an insultingly low offer even weirder.

"I was inclined to believe that rejection in the Ultimatum Game would be widespread. With the Machiguenga, they felt rejecting was absurd, which is really what economists think about rejection," Dr. Henrich says. "It's completely irrational to turn down free money. Why would you do that?"

It turns out the Machiguenga — whose number system goes: one, two, three, many — are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum Game play differently than Westerners. And that is one clue that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from the rest of humanity, according to Dr. Henrich. He and two other UBC researchers authored a paper shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a "truly unusual group of people" — the privileged products of Western industrial societies, who just happen to make up the vast majority of behavioural science test subjects.

The article, titled "The weirdest people in the world?", appears in the current issue of the journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Henrich and co-authors Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan argue that life-long members of societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic — people who are WEIRD — see the world in ways that are alien from the rest of the human family. The UBC trio have come to the controversial conclusion that, say, the Machiguenga are not psychological outliers among humanity. We are.

"If you're a Westerner, your intuitions about human psychology are probably wrong or at least there's good reason to believe they're wrong," Dr. Henrich says.

After analyzing reams of data from earlier studies, the UBC team found that WEIRD people reacted differently from others in experiment after experiment involving measures of fairness, anti-social punishment and co-operation, as well as visual illusions and questions of individualism and conformity.

Others punish participants perceived as too altruistic in co-operation games, but very few in the English-speaking West would ever dream of penalizing the generous. Westerners tend to group objects based on resemblance (notebooks and magazines go together, for example) while Chinese test subjects prefer function (grouping, say, a notebook with a pencil). Privileged Westerners, uniquely, define themselves by their personal characteristics as opposed to their roles in society.

Moreover, WEIRD people do not simply react to the world differently, according to the paper, they perceive it differently to begin with. Take the well-known Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which uses arrows to trick the viewer into thinking one line is longer than another, even if both are the same length. (See the diagram on this page.)

"No matter how many times you measure those lines, you can't cause yourself to see them as the same length," Dr. Henrich says. At least that's true for a Westerner. For some hunter-gatherers, the Muller-Lyer lines do not cause an illusion. "You do this with foragers in the Kalahari [Desert] and they just see the lines as the same length."

WEIRD people, the UBC researchers argue, have unusual ideas of fairness, are more individualistic and less conformist than other people. In many of these respects, Americans are the most "extreme" Westerners, especially young ones. And educated Americans are even more extremely WEIRD than uneducated ones.

"The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens," the authors conclude. "If the goal of the research program is to shed light on the human condition, then this narrow, unrepresentative sample may lead to an uneven and incomplete understanding."

In other words, we do not know what we thought we knew about the human mind. We only know about the mind of a particular, unusual slice of humanity.

The UBC researchers also found that 96% of behavioural science experiment subjects are from Western industrialized countries, which account for just 12% of the world's population. Sixty-eight percent were Americans. The United States is dominant in the field of psychology, accounting for 70% of all journal citations, compared with 37% in chemistry. Undergraduate students are often used to stand in for the entire species.

"This is a serious problem because psychology varies across cultures and chemistry doesn't," says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia.

The paper argues that either many studies' conclusions have to be retested on non-WEIRD cultural groups — a daunting proposition in terms of resources — or they must be understood to offer insight only into the minds of rich, educated Westerners.

If WEIRD people are indeed weird, it is the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that have made them so. In the example of the Muller-Lyer illusion, the UBC team hypothesizes that growing up in an industrial-era environment with plenty of 90-degree lines and carpentered edges led to WEIRD people's sense of vision being susceptible to the deception.

"We live in this world with police and institutions and pre-packaged food, TV, the Internet, watches and clocks and calendars. Our heads are loaded with all this information for navigating those environments. So we should expect our brains to be distorted," Dr. Henrich says.

North American behavioural scientists were aware of the issues raised by the paper. "It confirms something that many researchers knew all along but didn't want to admit or acknowledge because its implications are so troublesome," says Dr. Haidt of the University of Virginia, who was on a panel of academics who reviewed the article before publication.

Dr. Henrich says the UBC team expected stiff resistance to its ideas. But overall the paper has been well-received, says Dr. Haidt, although, of course, it has been read mostly by WEIRD academics. But how would the other 88% of humanity react? Would they be surprised to learn that rich Westerners are, in a word, weird?

"I don't think so," Dr. Henrich says.

Some psychologists doubt whether privileged Westerners actually are the odd people out. Cultural psychologist Will Bennis of Northwestern University applauds the UBC team's call to widen the spectrum of humanity studied by behavioural scientists, but he doubts whether a more cosmopolitan subject pool will sustain the idea that WEIRD people are "more unique, more distinct, more different from all the other populations that have been targets of research."

"Why do they look like outliers? Is it because they are more weird than other populations? Or is it something methodological that's making it look like they're outliers," Dr. Bennis asks.

He notes a human tendency, throughout history and across cultures, to regard one's own group as unique. "There's a lot of reasons why we might mistakenly assume that our group is special," he says. "The point isn't that our group is not special, it's that each group is special in its own unique way. As WEIRD psychologists ... we happen to know what's special about our own group and we happen to focus on that in our psychological research."

The WEIRD hypothesis does not throw out the whole idea of human behavioural and psychological universals. The UBC team remains confident that displays of pride and some aspects of mating, for example, will turn out to be pan-human characteristics.

The UBC researchers acknowledge the limits of what is known about WEIRD versus non-WEIRD populations. Because data comparing how people from different populations think is relatively hard to come by, the authors write, "we cannot accurately evaluate the full extent of how unusual WEIRD people are."

"This is, however, precisely the point. We hope research teams will be inspired to span the globe and prove our claims of non-representativeness wrong."

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Dancing at the Movies

A montage of movie dance scenes set perfectly to "Footloose" - A collection of dance clips from almost 40 movies from dance movies to comedies, from Fred Astaire to Micheal Jackson.

Google's Earth

By William Gibson

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google. Bentham’s all-seeing eye looks down from a central viewpoint, the gaze of a Victorian warder. In Google, we are at once the surveilled and the individual retinal cells of the surveillant, however many millions of us, constantly if unconsciously participatory. We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.

Much of the discussion of Mr. Schmidt’s interview centered on another comment: his suggestion that young people who catastrophically expose their private lives via social networking sites might need to be granted a name change and a fresh identity as adults. This, interestingly, is a matter of Google letting societal chips fall where they may, to be tidied by lawmakers and legislation as best they can, while the erection of new world architecture continues apace.

If Google were sufficiently concerned about this, perhaps the company should issue children with free “training wheels” identities at birth, terminating at the age of majority. One could then either opt to connect one’s adult identity to one’s childhood identity, or not. Childhoodlessness, being obviously suspect on a résumé, would give birth to an industry providing faux adolescences, expensively retro-inserted, the creation of which would gainfully employ a great many writers of fiction. So there would be a silver lining of sorts.

To be sure, I don’t find this a very realistic idea, however much the prospect of millions of people living out their lives in individual witness protection programs, prisoners of their own youthful folly, appeals to my novelistic Kafka glands. Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth, which surely the search engine, wielding as yet unimagined tools of transparency, eventually could and would do.

I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.

William Gibson is the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”

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After all these years, Beach Boys still sending out good vibrations

By KEITH LORIA

It's hard to think about summer music without conjuring up images of America's top pop band of all time, The Beach Boys. Songs such as "Surfin' USA," "Kokomo," "California Girls" and "Good Vibrations" have been part of the pop culture landscape for decades and it doesn't matter if you're 8 or 80, the songs seem to resonate with everyone.

Mike Love, along with his cousins Dennis, Carl and Brian Wilson and good friend Al Jardine comprised the original lineup from 1961 and Love continues the band today.

"I think the subject matter has a lot to do with the longevity of the songs," Love says. "We were writing about surfing, cars and great girls we lusted after. We really defined a Southern Californian lifestyle that could be vicariously enjoyed by people all around the world. There were great harmonies and fun lyrics and they became very successful."

With 36 top-40 hits, the Beach Boys have been on the American charts more than any other rock band and, although the band has gone through fights, hardships and adversity through the years, they continue to tour and put out best selling albums.

"Our last album -- 'Sounds of Summer' sold 3 million copies, which in the age of downloading, I think is really great," Love says. "It's incredible to us that we are still able to do what we love every day."

Touring hundreds of dates each year, Love and the band have probably sang each tune tens of thousands of times. Still, he says, the audience keeps the songs challenging and fun.

"It's a combination of the energy of the audience with the intricacies of the songs that keeps us on our toes as musicians," Love says. "Ninety-nine percent of the time we have a structured list, but we will drop in requests or different songs. The spontaneity of the audience and their singing along gets us all excited."

With two upcoming shows in Connecticut -- one at the Foxwoods casino on Aug. 6 and one a day earlier at the Live@Five outdoor event at Columbus Park in Stamford, the Beach Boys will be bringing their legendary harmonies to the state next week.

"The Stamford show is more of a party atmosphere with people eating and drinking and so it's slightly different," Love says. "Both shows will offer something great and people of all ages come to the show and have fun."

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the band that started as five California young lads harmonizing as good as anyone had ever heard.

It's just a special milestone. Not that many people have endured that long in the music field," Love says. "We started out in 61 and the Beatles and Rolling Stones came along later, and it really says a lot about the band as far as how much of an effect the band and the songs have had on people for so long."

Dennis and Carl Wilson have passed away and both Jardine and Brian Wilson continue to tour in their own bands, but as the 50th anniversary approaches, there is talk that all surviving members will reunite for a Beach Boys reunion in 2011, including early members Bruce Johnston and David Marks.

"I've had a few conversations recently with my cousin Brian about doing some musical projects together next year," Love says. "He's been busy but I think that we will get together and put a Beach Boys project together."

Love understands that the reunion would be big news. Looking ahead, Love says the group is also making plans to record some Beach Boys classics with some of the top contemporary artists.

"There are a lot of people I would like to work with and we are thinking about starting a new project next year to coincide with our 50th, and talking with Justin Timberlake for 'Good Vibrations" and Kenny Chesney for 'Kokomo,' and we are just starting to get in touch with people now," Love says. "We want to match up the artist with the proper Beach Boys song."

Another thing Love would enjoy is to continue bringing music to audiences both old and new.

"I'd like to play with some more symphony orchestras and I would like to do some new music," he says. "We were very fortunate early on that people liked our music and we had success and I'm looking forward to continuing doing what we love."

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