A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Howard the Gnome needs a new home , not to mention $15,000 to fix his rotting base . The recent news out of Nanoose Bay, where Howard has lived for more than two decades as one of the last of Vancouver Island's classic roadside attractions, prompts me to dig out my 1999 story on the gnome, who had yet to be named Howard at that time and was in the news for a whole other reason. When I first wrote about the big guy, Howard had yet to be moved to his current location at a Nanoose gas station, which didn't exist back then. He was a young thing then, and had been built in Ron Hale's garage out of dryer lint from the Alberni pulp mill among other odds and sods. Herewith, my Oct. 25, 1999 article from the Times Colonist archives on the gnome, who was a fresh fella barely two years old back in those days but already raising eyebrows in the Nanaimo Regional District, where critics thought his roadside presence was distracting to drivers and breaching sign bylaws. This art...

I'm seeing a pattern in my social media spaces right now, where I post some article or opinion piece on climate change and a climate-change denier emerges to comment in that way that the deniers always comment - which is to say, via distraction. It's a technique that people used regularly to try to shut me down back when I was writing newspaper columns and they didn't like what I was saying.  Men and women tend to use the strategy differently in my experience - a man typically diverts by repeatedly asking questions that have nothing to do with the matter at hand, while women will go to an emotional argument that is hot-potato-personal, like the weeping women who called me up after I questioned soaring Caesarean-section rates in Greater Victoria demanding to know if I was suggesting that their babies should have died. It can be surprisingly effective as a tool to completely divert an issue into an irrelevant and useless direction that ultimately ends with the respectiv...

Apart from the sunshine, heat, nice people and good food down here in Honduras, where we are vacationing until March 10, I am mad for the snorkelling. Utila is a small, rustic island (think Hornby Island, if you're from BC) on the Caribbean coast. It's the remarkably less touristy sister island to Roatan, and one of my favourite places in the world for chilling out for a few weeks in the dead of winter and letting go of all those dark thoughts that can plague a person who thinks too much in times like these. Here's a few scenes from the underwater world that I captured while snorkelling three beaches around the island in the last couple of days. The standard trade winds have died right off at the moment - a mixed blessing, because it makes doing underwater videos a little easier, but it also makes things way hotter above the surface, with a bigger chance that bugs are going to bite you. Join me for a flight over Fish City.

Here's a  must-read from the New Yorker on the strange and unsettling ways that social media and mainstream media interact in the modern world to take a thin story involving almost nobody and turn it into a viral phenomenon that actually looks like something big happened. The example of the moment: the uproar over those Covington Catholic High School students. With one side crying racism and the other side saying the Indigenous guy started it, the world quickly divided according to their viewpoints, and everybody got savaged. This think piece takes a step back to reveal that in fact, none of the participants came out looking good when you get beyond the massive media firestorm and take a look at the video footage. Perhaps more importantly, the analysis reveals that the world blew up over an event so small that the reaction is actually the story. Yet that reaction changed nothing, other than to push us all a little farther into our individual perspectives and away from e...

Listening to the conversations of sex workers talking about their work is a privilege for me that lifts me up no matter how low the ways of the world have left me. The dream of capturing those voices for the world to hear started a couple of years ago for me when I did a series of communications workshops for Peers Victoria with indoor workers and was completely captivated by their conversations. It got me wishing for a podcast. We did our first episode in June 2018 and learned a lot, most especially that doing the recording with a single mike in a room comfortable to sex workers is important. We wanted to do a podcast every month but life got in my way in the intervening months, but seven sex workers and sex workers rights activists managed to get together last week to record the second episode. Here it is! The topic this time out is "What do you want the world to know about your work?"  Please suspend whatever you think you know about sex work and have a listen to the...