I'm the guy under the X, but I don't even recall exactly what year it was. (It was essentially chuckwagon races on ice. We all had skates on; some of us were horses; Stuart -- the smallest -- was sitting in the plywood chuckwagon; out-riders; the whole shebang!)
I only heard about the first two incidents second hand, but I knew and listened daily to the fellow in the third.
Fellow wants to get some sun tanning in, so he goes on top of the octagonal fiberglass cupola for some rays. And there's not much room up there, so he replaces the octagonal access hatch so he can sit on it...and then the swinging hatch latches do what swinging latches tend to do and he's stuck up there. He gets burned pretty badly, but at least his absence is noted at the next thrice-daily check-in and/or weather report, so a helicopter is sent out.
A bear smells something good, so it breaks the kitchen window just above the sink to try and gain access. The tower guy has a gun and shoots it dead. But there's either a fire-flap or thick fog, so a dead bear with flies buzzing around it is taking up space in his kitchen sink for an inconveniently lengthy time.
You may remember the yellow bars that we used to drag behind push mowers to kill dandy lions. They were about the consistency of a bar of soap. There's one in the generator shed, and buddy's dog gets a hold of it and does more than just nibble. By the time buddy finds his dog, it's too late. Buddy didn't really elaborate over the radio much more than that, but it couldn't have been a good way to go.
Some guy on Alberta towers who was proficient with silk-screening, I'm guessing. He also did a bunch for the 1993 season, but mine got so tattered that I must've thrown it out long ago.
The first couple of pages are about my prior two summers fighting fires (in the late 1980's), so just skip ahead if you want. https://www.evanbedford.com/fighting_fires_spotting_smokes.pdf
(If you're wondering where the rest of the book is, it's in the main website under the yellow book thumbnail).
The snippet below is from the May issue of Harper's Magazine. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I'll add relevant snippets as they come along.
Full disclosure: I'm 66 years old, but I fully realize the terrible situation that we've been cultivating for younger generations. Here in Canada, the issue that comes to mind is the OAS gov't payments that even relatively well-off boomers get. A good reminder for us is Paul Kershaw's Generation Squeeze. I read his columns every so often in the Globe and Mail. https://www.gensqueeze.ca/
I've scanned the whole interview and put the resulting pdf here: landemore_macleod_intv.pdf
A snippet of the interview is below and ongoing chapter by chapter reviews of both Landemore's and MacLeod's books are here r/deliberativedemocracy
I can think of two barriers. First is that practically nobody has ever heard of things like citizens' assemblies, etc. I was at a local political party meeting (provincial), and nobody had heard of citizens' assemblies. Even the constituency chairperson and the candidate in the previous election had no idea. Even though, in the adjacent province (BC), there was one back in the early 2000's to look at possibly changing the constitution.
And second, if someone has heard of citizens' assemblies, they might just associate them with populism, which is pretty much the polar opposite. Ignorance prevails. The following clip is from the book Democracy's Second Act, which I've slowly been reading and have posted about in a separate thread. Check out what the massive corporation BASF thinks. (It's regarding the French citizens' assembly on climate change policy).
the last few words on the next page are \"they wanted it to go.\"
Evan Bedford on deliberative democracy, social cohesion, and civic journalism, etc
Wow. Another book just out on citizens' assemblies. So I'll start another chapter by chapter commentary with snippets here and there. This one is from Canada, a place I know sorta well, since I was born here back in 1959.
