The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Survivors walk on a road amidst heavy downpour after “super typhoon” Haiyan/Yolanda battered Tacloban city in central Philippines. (Source: International Business Times.)

The “super typhoon” known as “Haiyan” or “Yolanda” hit the central Philippines a few days ago, plowing into an estimated 25 million people, and killing an estimated 10,000. With sustained winds of up to 315 km/h (200 mph) — that’s 40 mph faster than the typical landing speed of a 737 — and gusts of up to 380 km/h (235 mph), the trail of devastation left by what is believed to be the strongest tropical storm in recorded history to make landfall is horrifying.

A man walks through the debris of smashed houses in Tacloban city, Leyte province, central Philippines. (Source: ABC News Australia.)

Philippine infrastructure isn’t what it should be at the best of times, and after a disaster like this one, it’s far, far worse. According to Nina Corpuz, a reporter with the Philippine TV channel ABS-CBN, only one hospital in the city of Tacloban, which was hit hard by the typhoon, is functioning, and it’s limited to 250 beds. With buildings reduced to rubble and roads destroyed, food, shelter, power, and medicine are in short supply.

Empty coffins lie on a street near houses damaged after “super typhoon” Haiyan/Yolanda battered Tacloban city. (Source: International Business Times.)

If you’d like to help with a donation, consider these guidelines from Shai Coggins, my fellow blogger from the Philippines. She used these when trying to decide where to send her money:

1. I’d like my donation to go directly to the aid of the people affected by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. That’s why I passed up on organisations whose “donate” button sent me to a general “international crisis” fund.

2. I want to donate to a local organisation who’s already doing the work in the affected areas. Reading news articles that pointed me to organisations who are already sending in people and aid made me look at their work more closely. This way, I can just support what they’ve started.

3. I need the donation process to be simple and straightforward, and one I can help to promote to others who might want to donate too. That’s why I liked donation pages that offer several options to send in the money – from Paypal and online credit cards to cheques and bank transfers.

This is how I ended up sending my support to the Philippine Red Cross at this time.

1000 Philippine pesos is a helpful amount to donate, and in U.S. and Canadian currency, that’s less than 25 bucks.

@SBTaskForce needs urgent help processing msgs for Typhoon #Yolanda – anyone can help! http://t.co/JKadmTNnlh #crisismapping @CrisisMappers

— Melissa Elliott (@MelyMello) November 10, 2013

If you have an internet connection and some time to spare, you can also help directly by participating in the “crisis mapping” effort. For more details, see here.

Sustained 315 km/h (200 mph) winds blew through Tacloban city, destroying houses and lifting cars. (Source: ABC News Australia.)

I’d like to send a big shout-out to the U.S. Marine Corps, who’ve responded to the Philippine government’s call for assistance. Thanks, guys!

U.S. Marines arrive in the Philippines at the request of the Philippine Government. (Source: TIME’s supertyphoon live blog.)

Filipinos are disproportionately big social media/smartphone/mobile phone users, so social media’s playing a big role in relief efforts and helping to find missing or displaced people. These hashtags may come in handy:

To stay on top of this news, TIME has a great live blog providing regularly updated coverage.

Poppies thrive in overturned soil, which is why they bloom in battlefields.

I’m in the United States as I write this, where November 11th — the anniversary of the end of World War I, also known as the Great War — is referred to as Veterans Day. In Canada and many other Commonwealth countries, November 11th is referred to as Remembrance Day.

Lt. Col. John Alexander McCrae, author of In Flanders Fields..

The symbol of Remembrance Day is the poppy, which grew in abundance in some of Europe’s bloodiest battlefields during World War I, and became the central image of In Flanders Fields, a poem written by Canadian soldier Lt. Col. John Alexander McCrae, a field surgeon assigned to the First Field Artillery Brigade after a particularly bloody battle in Ypres that started on April 22, 1915 and that lasted 17 days. After performing a funeral for his Alexis Helmer (no chaplain was available), McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance, from which wild poppies could be seen growing in a nearby cemetery, and wrote the following into his notebook:

Here’s the text of the poem:

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

He showed the poem to a Cyril Allinson, a 22 year-old sergeant-major, who was delivering mail at the time. Allinson is quoted as saying:

His face was very tired but calm as we wrote. He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer’s grave.

The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind.

It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.

McCrae wasn’t satisfied with the poem and tossed it away. Luckily, a fellow officer retrieved it, and it was submitted to two British magazines: The Spectator and Punch. The Spectator rejected it, but fortunately for generations of soldiers, Punch saw fit to publish it in December 1915.

For our soldiers and the sacrifices they made, I’d like to say “thank you”.

Remember, that Facebook, while a handy world-spanning bulletin board, is no substitute for real life. Get out there, and don’t let Facebook turn your life into this…

Gary Smith tells me that this is a work by Polish illustrator Pawel Kuczynski, who’s done a lot of interesting satirical drawings in the same style.

The National Post has been doing a killer job on covering the Rob Ford story. They’ve even dug up a quote of his from 2005, back when he was a city councillor, where he — despite not being a doctor or in public health, and allegedly having close ties to the drug trade on both the supply and demand sides — said that harm reduction doesn’t work:

“You’re not helping them, you’re enabling them,” Mr. Ford said. “They’re going to smoke that crack whether you give them those crack pipes or not. They’re going to shoot that heroin whether you give them clean needles or not. If people want a change, it has to come from within.”

“You have to get these people into rehabilitation and if they don’t want to go, well, then you just enforce the law. If it’s illegal, you arrest them. That’s the bottom line and if they have to dry out in jail — great,” he said.

“I know for a fact that tough love has worked and I’m talking from personal experience. If you just enable someone and give them a place to live and money, nothing changes,” Mr. Ford said.

The Post has been doing such great work on Rob Ford, despite the fact that the politics he claims to support is right up their “George W. Bush Lite” alley. It’s almost as if they’re trying to atone for something.

Oh yeah, I remember now:

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report had a field day with Rob Ford’s belated admission that yes he did smoke crack — and hey, it was during one of his drunken stupours, so that’s different, amirite?

The Daily Show, November 4, 2013

The Daily Show, November 5, 2013

Jon Stewart makes a great point on the November 5th Daily Show:

“Mayor Ford’s a lot of fun to ridicule. My guess is, not a lot of fun to eulogize.”

He also says something I agree with as a humour writer: Even though I’d lose a lot of good source material, I’d much rather Rob Ford went into rehab and cleaned out rather than have to write an article that began with something like “While I disagreed with the guy on many, many, many points, I didn’t want to see him die tragically from an overdose/substance-fuelled misadventure/drug gang-related incident”.

The Colbert Report, November 5, 2013

The phrase “Chris Farley tribute mayor” is apt in so many ways.

After all these months, Toronto’s Peter Griffin-esque mayor (and now Marion Barry-esque, minus the Master’s in chemistry and an enviable civil rights record) Rob Ford had no choice but to finally ‘fess up and admit that yes, he did smoke crack. The Toronto Star, who along with the New York gossip site Gawker broke the story, have faced months of accusations from the mayor’s base — often referred to as “Ford Nation” — of fabricating the whole thing in some kind of anti-Ford lefty vendetta, and not the logical conclusion of a lifetime of living off Daddy’s reflected sunlight and label printing company, substance abuse, general buffoonery, and an entourage of pals who still live with their parents and have rap sheets as long as your arm.

I myself tend to the view that as long as no harm directly comes to anyone else, drugs should be treated as a health rather than a criminal issue. My beef with the mayor is the lying to the public — apparently “respect for taxpayers” and “telling the truth to the taxpayers are two markedly different things — and the criminality. He’s got associations with Toronto’s criminal element that run pretty deep, and now Doug Ford (the mayor’s brother, a city councillor, and someone who operates under the delusion that he’s Toronto’s co-mayor) has pretty much declared war on the chief of police for doing his job.

I’m too busy celebrating my birthday in San Francisco as I write this — by the bye, Mayor Ford, this is an amazing birthday present, thanks! — so I’ll leave it to fellow Toronto-based programmer Reg Braithwaite to say what’s on my mind:

Ford Nation are the Ontario equivalent of the Tea Party. Peel back the veneer, and you find someone who truly, deeply feels that “Toronto The Good” doesn’t work. Who feels that it works for someone else. For downtowners, or liberals, or cyclists, or unionized employees, or something else.

Ford Nation thinks Toronto is all about “someone else,” not about them. To Ford Nation, Toronto looks down upon the suburbs and taxpayers, and Ford Nation is angry about that. So Ford Nation elects a man who has but one job to do: Troll Toronto. Disrupt. Delay. Distract.

The primary characteristic of being trolled is when you are trying to achieve something positive, but can’t make any headway because the other party’s agenda is to disrupt and hijack the conversation.

To Ford Nation, nothing getting done is a job well done. Rob Ford wasn’t elected to win respect for taxpayers, Rob Ford was elected to show Ford Nation’s disrespect for City Hall.

And so, all this debate about him smoking crack is irrelevant. Suggestions of rehab are a complete side-show. Rob Ford doesn’t need to go to rehab to get elected. He simply needs to do the job he was hired to do:

Disrupt Toronto, Delay Toronto, and Distract Toronto. All so that the people angry with Toronto can sit back and enjoy a good trolling. And when you make the mistake of trying to reason with them, you’re playing into their hands.

Don’t do that, Toronto. Don’t feed the trolls.

Be sure to read Reg’s full article in the Huffington Post.

Alternate title: Rob Ford’s image consultant.