Three years ago, when the Amazon Kindle was little more than a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye, I wrote an article for The Walrus called “Apocalypse Soon: The future of reading.” In it, I lamented how my book publishers had prevented me from releasing my debut novel online, and predicted an e-book revolution, the rise of e-readers, widespread e-piracy, the demise of many publishers and booksellers, and, ultimately, a world in which readers would decide whether to pay for books after reading them.

Now seems like a good time to follow up. Not least because my predictions appear to be coming true. E-readers like the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad (with its associated iBooks app) are spreading everywhere; the market share of e-books has already eclipsed audiobooks, and continues to grow like bamboo; local bookstores are vanishing by the hundred, Amazon has gone to war against publishers over e-book prices, and Borders is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the publishing industry has been sufficiently shaken that hardly a day goes by without one of its dinosaurs penning another tedious navel-gazing essay about this terrifying brave new world. (Most such claim that piracy won’t be a significant factor, from which I conclude that the essayists in question are either smoking crack or in deep denial.)

But the important question isn’t What does this all mean for the book business? What matters is What does it mean for books? (Though authors, and aspiring authors — a group which, so far as I can tell, includes approximately half the human population — tend to also tack on What does it mean for us?) Answers are hard to come by. My friend Jo Walton recently wrote a blog post about her personal experience with online publication entitled “Some actual information about ebooks”; it ends with, “I’m posting this because it’s not handwaving or airy speculation, it’s actual data, of which there seems to be something of a shortage.”

She’s quite right. And so, in a similar vein, I’d like to tell you about my squirrel.

In 2006, I wrote a 300-page novel called Beasts of New York about a squirrel in Central Park. Yes, a squirrel. No, it’s not a children’s book. My agents loved it, and sent it out to dozens of publishers. They did not love it. Who, they quite reasonably asked, is the market for this book? Alas, that was a question without an answer.

In 2007, I wanted to release my debut novel Dark Places online under a Creative Commons license, so that anyone would be permitted to download it, copy it, and give away as many copies as they liked. My publishers would not permit this. (Yes, publishers, plural; the American, British, and Canadian e-book rights were sold separately. And yes, that’s insane.) So I decided to release Beasts of New York online instead. Boldly forth I went, into the digital maelstrom.

The initial results can most charitably be described as a crashing failure. I built a spiffy-looking web site, thanks to a graphic designer friend and my own software skills. I posted a chapter every day, as all the how-to-blog articles advised, hoping that serialization would grow an audience. I emailed every media contact I had, hoping for reviews and coverage. And…

Nothing. I was the author of four previously published, well-received novels which had sold tens of thousands of physical copies; my work freely given online attracted fewer than 200 readers. The audience did seem to really like the book, which was gratifying; but their numbers did not increase. A year after I released BoNY online, it had been read by perhaps 500 people. I wrote it off as a sad, failed experiment, and stopped paying any attention to it.

And then.

In January 2009, someone uploaded a copy of BoNY to a website called Feedbooks, which quickly became the Internet’s primary source of free e-books. According to BoNY’s Feedbooks page, it has since been downloaded almost 10,000 times from that site alone. Throw in Manybooks, scribd, and similar sources, and I went from 500 to 15,000 readers in the space of a year. Nowhere near bestseller territory — but given the approximate 5 percent market share that e-books command, not bad at all. (What happened? I have a two-word, one-gadget explanation: the iPhone.)

In September 2009, I sold Beasts of New York to The Porcupine’s Quill, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary presses. They didn’t buy it because it had become an Internet hit; they bought it because they liked it. But its online success sure didn’t hurt.

Lessons learned, for aspiring authors:

• There’s no money in online publishing — yet. Between Amazon’s Kindle platform, Apple’s iBooks, and Google Books, there may be some money, eventually; but for now, you release a book online to grow your audience, not to get rich.

• If you love your book, set it free. Don’t charge for it. Release it under a Creative Commons license that explicitly allows readers to copy it and give it away. Half-measures — making the text available only as JPGs on your website, to pick one egregiously awful example — are worse than nothing.

• Not least because no one wants to read your book on a computer. They want to read it on the subway, on their phone, their Kindle, or some other mobile device. So make it available as a download formatted for e-readers or smartphones. (Feedbooks does this automatically.)

• But don’t just dump a lump of text on people. Do a little basic typesetting (and consider specifically typesetting for smartphones, as a friend of mine did for BoNY), and copyedit, copyedit, copyedit.

• Be patient, and recognize that you may not succeed. In fact, you probably won’t. Success in the arts is always a crap shoot; you can improve your odds, but you can never guarantee a win. That’s something that hasn’t changed between the old world and this brave new one.

In the March 2010 issue of The Walrus, Arno Kopecky’s article “Law of the Jungle” took a hard look at Canada’s recent free trade deal with Peru. A few days ago, Kopecky flew back into Lima, Peru’s capital, en route to the country’s northern jungle. During the months to come, he’ll be “piping up semi-regularly” from the region with notes on local effects of the Canadian government’s so-called Americas Strategy. This is his first post of the blog series to come.

It seems that strategy matters to the Harper Administration, which made sure the proposed Free Trade Agreement with Colombia was the first bill Parliament saw after prorogation. The issue of free trade always inspires colourful debate, but this one is particularly heated, in light of allegations linking Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s government to an impressively wide range of human rights abuses. CBC’s The Current ran a good piece on the issue in late February; writing in the Globe and Mail a few days later, Campbell Clark suggested that our government’s motivations in signing the deal have less to do with money than power. After all, he noted, Colombia only buys about 0.2 percent of our exports, so what’s really going on here is a snub to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, arch enemy of Prez Uribe and all things fair and free.

While I don’t doubt Harper’s enthusiasm for the Great Game (and hockey too), I do think it’s important to consider what we might want to buy, and on what terms, from an oil-sodden country filled with precious woods and metals. So far, there’s little evidence that even the most benevolent intentions from Ottawa and Bogota can enforce human rights and environmental regulations in Colombia’s hinterland.

I haven’t been to Colombia yet, so rather than wade deeper into speculative cynicism, I’ll refer to an experience I had last fall in another resource-loaded, regulation-deprived country now linked by free trade to Canada: Peru. Speaking off the record (sigh) with a Canadian diplomat in Lima, I asked why Canada had refused to publicly criticize Peru’s government for a lethal clampdown on native protesters in the Peruvian Amazon last June — precisely the kind of action everyone fears in Colombia. (The Peruvian protests were a direct response to free trade and resource extraction on native land.) This seemed as good a chance as any to hold our trade partners accountable for human rights. The diplomat, however, assured me that conversations were taking place behind closed doors, and that to raise the issue publicly would be counterproductive.

Really? Then why did Peter Kent, our Minister of State of Foreign Affairs for the Americas, immediately and publicly condemn Chavez — with whom Canada is not even considering a FTA — for shutting down six television stations in January? I don’t ask that question to endorse Chavez or his tactics. But as Canada starts hurling sticks and carrots into Latin America, I wonder how carefully we’re watching where they land. Sooner or later, folks here will start throwing them back.

1. “Every Japanese Arnold Schwarzenegger commercial ever made” by Ron Nurwisah | The Ampersand
The Japanese have advanced the surrealist form of advertising more than any other culture. In this spirit of innovation in the field, I present this video post. Really, it’s not just because listening to Arnie attempt to speak Japanese is downright hilarious.

2. “Avatar and the politics of our time” by Rick Salutin | rabble.ca
Salutin, a former seminarian, ponders why, in the current political discourse, left wing equals secular and right wing equals religious. Is there no room in the middle?

3. “Toronto’s Disenfranchised Voters” by Myer Siemiatycki | The Mark
Toronto is gearing up for municipal elections this October. Come voting time, however, only a third of eligible electors will turn out at the polls. Is it time to let the city’s massive non-citizen population — about one in seven residents — vote in local elections?

4. “Rogier van der Zwaag” by Jeff Hamada | BOOOOOOOM!
And the belated Oscar for Best Direction of an Incredibly Complicated Music Video That Looks Like CG, But Is Actually an Animated Sequence of 4,085 Photos goes to… Rogier van der Zwaag, for “Grindin’” by (Dutch electro group) Nobody Beats the Drum.

5. “Gracias, Sean!” by Michael C. Moynihan | Hit & Run
After his incoherent speech at this year’s actual Oscars, Sean Penn kept up the craziness by appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and suggesting that critics of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez should be jailed for their “biases.” Um, Sean? You’re not exactly known as Mr. Fair and Balanced.

6. “French village went insane after CIA spiked its bread with LSD” by Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing
Fifty years ago, residents of the French town Pont-Saint-Esprit became temporarily insane after eating bread from their local bakery. Five people died, and dozens were sent to the asylum. The mystery of the “cursed bread incident” is finally solved. Uncovered documents reveal that the American CIA spiked the bread with LSD: yet another of its notorious tests of the drug’s efficacy as a weapon.

7. “Is Torture a Leading U.S. Export?” by Scott Horton | No Comment
This week, a former director of the British Intelligence service MI5 made a surprise public accusation about US motives for interrogating captured Al Qaeda members. “Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld certainly watched 24. The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” said Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, reigniting a fiery debate about the allied countries’ treatment of terror suspects.

8. “Liberals take another shot at Tory ‘Bonnie and Clyde’” by Jane Taber | Bureau Blog
Lately, her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has likened former Alberta Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer and his wife, junior cabinet minister Helena Guergis, to the infamous crime duo because of his sweetheart deal to dismiss a cocaine possession charge and her blowup at the Charlottetown Airport. Taber points out the illogic of the association: Bonnie and Clyde paid for their crime spree with their lives.

9. “World’s Richest Man: The Carlos Slim Story” by John Hudson | The Atlantic Wire
Forbes has released its annual list of the world’s wealthiest people. At the top of the heap this time is Lebanese-Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helú, worth an astonishing $53.5 billion (US). His companies are responsible for about 7 percent of Mexico’s entire economic output.

10. “How Cars Are Killing Us” by Andrew Price | GOOD Blog
It wouldn’t be Weekend Links without an infographic. This one, using data compiled by the World Health Organization’s global status report on road safety, shows how cars are killing us with more than pollution.

1. “The State of the Internet, in Infographics and Video” by Patrick James | GOOD Blog
So many good infographics out there. This one, by creative agency Jess3, condenses the net’s mind-boggling growth into a handy four-minute video.

2. “Gender-neutral O Canada: An idea whose time already happened—130 years ago” by Luke Champion | This Magazine
Introducing gender-neutrality into the lyrics of our national anthem is not a new idea. Calixa Lavallée and Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier’s original French version was sans bias, and R. Stanley Weir’s 1908 English poem includes the line now being proposed to replace “in all thy sons command” — “thou dost in us command.” Personally, I think we should adopt “The Maple Leaf Forever” and be done with it.

3. “Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Epilogue: Why Educators Need A ‘Cultural Utility Belt’” by Linda Holmes | Monkey See
Neil deGrasse Tyson is probably the most charismatic astrophysicist alive, as evidenced by his numerous Daily Show and Colbert Report appearances. In this account of a speech he gave to 2,000 physics teachers, he argues that to really connect with students, teachers must be attuned to young people’s cultural reference points.

4. “Does Google Books Do No Evil?” by Mark Leslie Lefebvre | The Mark
In a deal struck between Google and the Authors Guild of America, writers will receive a paltry $60 (US) per book available for unlimited viewings on Google Books. According to Lefebvre, this agreement could lead to the company gaining monopolistic control over digitized literature. Does that sound like its informal slogan: “Don’t be evil”?

5. “Shorts Program: Animated Oscar Edition” by Jandy Stone | Row Three
The Oscars air this Sunday, and once again I am woefully behind on seeing the films up for best picture. But, thanks to the fine folks over at Row Three, I’ve now caught up on the nominees for best animated short.

6. “Polytechnique leads the Genie Awards with 11 nominations” by Melissa Leong | The Ampersand
With so much interest focused on the Oscars, our very own Genie Awards may, once again, get swept under the rug. A shame, because truly great Canadian films like Polytechnique (eleven nominations) and Nurse.Fighter.Boy (ten nominations) deserve our attention.

7. “Michael O’Donoghue Is Plunging Steel Needles into His Eyes From the Grave” by Matt Welch | Hit & Run
Welch laments what he sees as Saturday Night Live’s fall from anti-establishment greatness and loss of cultural relevance. You may quibble with his assertions, but this post is worth it for the Ron Howard–directed presidential reunion sketch starring current and former SNL greats — created for Funny or Die, not the venerable TV franchise.

8. “Open your wallets for plastic cash” by Steven Chase | Ottawa Notebook
Perhaps the most surprising element of Stephen Harper’s new budget is the announcement that, starting in late 2011, plastic will replace paper-cotton as the material of choice for bank notes. The polymer material is apparently very hard to counterfeit, and will allow for more complex designs and security features.

9. “Marketers can (literally) read your mind” by Karl Bates | Futurity
Advertisers have been experimenting with a technique called “neuromarketing,” which uses brain scans to detect a consumer’s reactions to various products. Basically it’s a high-tech focus group, but I think it’s the first step down a slippery slope that leads to commercials being beamed into our dreams à la Futurama.

10. “Changes at Chatelaine” | Masthead Online
Thursday was a brain drainer at Chatelaine — six employees were laid off, including most of the editors who handled the magazine’s newsiest articles. The title has recently slipped in both subscriptions and single-copy sales, but lobotomizing its content seems like an odd plan to reverse course.

It’s two days after the golden goal. What do we know? Canada is the world’s preeminent hockey power. This is not in doubt. It was not in doubt before the torch was lit in Vancouver, it was not in doubt after the initial loss to the Americans, and, shivers of horror aside, it was not even in doubt when the US’s Zach Parise scored with twenty-four seconds left in regulation to send the gold medal game to overtime.

Canada is the global hockey hegemon, this is certain knowledge. We know this, as certainly as we ever know anything about hockey, which is to say we are somewhere between 60 and 80 percent sure. Yes, for the past thirty years, there has been a consistent stream of excellent players from other countries. The Soviet system, through massive investment and militaristic discipline, managed to produce a top end of players who could compete with the quality of players Canada used to find by trawling frozen ponds with fine-mesh nets and picking out likely looking seven-year-olds. There has been a legion of elite Russians, Finns, Swedes, Czechs — even the occasional lonesome American — who, in an individual contest, if there was such a thing as an individual contest in hockey, could best virtually any single Canadian sent against them. Any country with systematized talent scouting, a well-funded training and development program, and frozen water has it in them to grow a great hockey player, even a team of them.

But hockey, if you care about objective things, is a longue duree game. You’ve gotta look big — careers, decades, generations — to get at the truth. And the bigger you look, the bigger Canada is. Canada has more players skating on more rinks across more cities than any other country; there are more Canadians making more money filling out the ranks of worldwide professional hockey leagues than any other nationality. Everything in hockey that is most, greatest, or oldest belongs to Canada or Canadians. Count it all from the beginning — all the championships, all the goals, all the stars, all the innovations — and no other country compares. Everyone knows this. It is so known that it’s a cliché, a stereotype, a joke; it’s so well-known that non-hockeyish Canadians are sometimes angered by it. Canada has produced a great many good and worthy things, but hockey is its showpiece. It is the spectacle Canada performs for the world.

Yet still, somehow, despite all that, it sometimes becomes a matter of one game.

It shouldn’t, really. One game is a matter of luck. One game is bounces, deflections, moods, moments. The Canadian Men’s Olympic team would have to be playing the Turkish Women’s Under-18 team to guarantee a victory in advance. A game like Sunday’s gold medal match? There were at least thirty players crossing that ice who have it somewhere in them to break a game open, on the right night, with the right bounces. Even granting, as a matter of course, that the Canadian team was objectively superior in talent to the Americans, they only win that game maybe fifty-seven times in a hundred. If, as postulated by Hugh Everett, the timeline does indeed bifurcate with every possible outcome of every possible choice, then that Big Game shattered time into a metric bajillion little bubbles of possibility: somewhere out there in the sprawling multiverse, the Americans won 8-0 on a Joe Pavelski hat trick and Patrick Kane is dancing around his bedroom wearing nothing but a lumpen gold medallion over his bits. Absolutely anything might have happened.

It’s just one game. There’s a lot you can’t learn from one game. You can’t learn who is the best player in the world. You can’t learn which is the best team in the world. One game is never going to tell you whose hockey passion runs deeper or whose stylistic values are superior, who is tougher, stronger, faster, or smarter. That gold medal game didn’t mean anything in the causal sense of the word. It was not a compelling piece of evidence proving a heretofore uncertain hypothesis. Canada is not the greatest hockey nation in the world because it won a Gold Medal in the 2010 Olympics — it was that nation before the game and it would continue to be after it, regardless of the outcome. There is no one game, anywhere, ever, that defines an authentic superiority.

And yet, on Sunday afternoon, 16.6 million Canadians cleared their schedules. They stood out in chilly plazas, crowded into bars, squished onto couches, sat on floors. They painted their faces, put on jerseys, drew up signs, wrapped themselves in flags. They yelled over the radio, ranted on the web, struck up anxious conversations with total strangers. They prayed, pleaded, cajoled, threatened, and bribed the hockey gods with everything from money to flesh for victory. For a game that, even in the winning, would not make them anything more than they already were.

Maybe it’s just a form of mass hysteria, the most popular delusion of all, or maybe it’s a tribute to the success of the Olympic brand. Maybe it’s just the natural human response to hype: if enough people assert with enough volume and sincerity the ABSOLUTE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF THIS ONE INIMITABLE EVENT, we cannot help but believe. That may very well be true. It certainly makes psychological sense. But it also makes us sheep, and let’s pretend for the moment that we’re more than that, and that we have good reasons for caring about the things we care about.

Such games are a unique species of sporting event: the athletic tautology. The Big Game recognizes no influence external to itself. There is nothing that can be done before that can control it, there is no advance knowledge that can predict it, it is a black box of randomness. Not necessarily luck, which implies uncaused, uncontrolled events, but the liberating kind of random that obviates the fatalism of probability. Random is not chaos, it’s opportunity, the chance for any player on either team to win the game. Over a season, some players might be forty-goal guys and others ten-goal guys, but in a single game, any player might be a one-goal guy, and that one goal may be the only one that matters. In an athletic tautology, there is no reason, there is only event: It is what it is.

And that’s the beauty of the Big Game, because the laws of probability might allow for any number of feasible outcomes, but in the end, in this only universe, this best of all possible worlds, only one thing happens. It is the single greatest moment of existential freedom a player can face, a point where he ceases to be whatever he otherwise is, whatever he inevitably will be over the eighty games of a season or the 600 games of a career, and is nothing greater or lesser than what he can accomplish in sixty minutes.

Sports matter because they give us metaphors for life, miniaturized scenarios stripped down to the bare essentials. Half of life is la longue duree, the things we do repeatedly, our habits, our jobs, our homes, our families, the things and people and places that recur again and again. That is the part of life where we practice, and grow, and struggle, and eventually become what we are. But the other half is the singular chances, the days unlike any other, the moments. The interviews, the dates, the tests, the accidents — these are life’s elimination series. Those events are not less real or momentous because they don’t give us the time to show the true depths and dimensions of our character. When the Big Game happens in real life, we don’t call it unrepresentative, we just call it unfair. And it is.

It’s possible, the Americans might have won that game, it could have happened. It’s a singular opportunity, right? And it’s a hockey game. Any number of players might have taken that moment, might have made that shot.

They might have. But at 7:40 in sudden death overtime, the Venerable Sidney caught the puck on his stick and did nothing more special than the basic principle, the thing screamed by a million coaches, a million dads, a million fans at a million frantic players across this good cold land a hundred times every day, the thing a million upon million desperate watchers screamed at TVs around the world in that very moment: he shot. Blindly, desperately, from an angle so bad it wouldn’t be a goal in most Timbits games, he just put it on net. It was no highlight goal, no spectacular display of the artistry or technical proficiency that we usually expect from him. It was just an ordinary little shot, a good effort at the right moment, but it worked, and it was his, and it was Canada’s.

At that moment, a metric bajillion possibilities all popped like so many silvery bubbles, shattered right there in the air at the sound of a goal horn, leaving only a faint sheen of might have on the American team, leaving behind only one reality.

Who cares, now, about who might have done it, who could have done it, who deserved it? Who cares, now, about potentials and probabilities? Leave that shit to the philosophers and the gamblers, and the suits in the high boxes a-machinatin’ for the endless cyclic seasons of the NHL. We have seen the contention of hockey nations brought to one, great, unpredictable, uncontrollable moment of total freedom, and we have seen Canada take that moment. It’s a victory apart from the objective superiority of la longue duree, and that much sweeter because of it. Over a century, you might see who is the best, but in one game, you find out who can be. It’s good to be both.

Ellen Etchingham blogs about hockey at theoryofice.blogspot.com.

(Photo by Jonathan Pope)

1. “Cash graffiti” by Xeni Jardin | Boing Boing
When I was a child, I thought drawing on cash was a serious crime that invited easy prosecution. Obviously these guerrilla artists had no such fear. Follow Jardin’s link to see thirty examples of hilarious money art. (My personal favourite: “The Boba Fett Dollar.”)

2. “Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for health supplements” by David McCandless and Andy Perkins | Information Is Beautiful
Ever wondered if drinking green tea or taking fish oil actually benefits your health? Puzzle no longer. This info-graphic separates the bunk from the benefits when it comes to popular health supplements.

3. “How to Be a Skating Score Nerd: The Futile Search For Understanding” by Linda Holmes | Monkey See
According to the Globe and Mail’s John Doyle, we’re a figure skating nation, and for once I’m inclined to agree with him. On the heels of Joannie Rochette’s heroic bronze-medal performance at the Vancouver Winter Games, Monkey See offers a guide to (perhaps) better understanding the sport’s Byzantine scoring system.

4. “Olympic economic impacts much smaller than promised” by Andrew MacLeod | The Hook
Residents of Vancouver and B.C. were promised a $10 billion economic boom for hosting the Winter Games; it now looks like they’ll get substantially less. The Conference Board of Canada and an independent accounting firm put the actual figure at roughly $1.6 billion, much lower than even the province’s revised estimate of $4 billion.

5. “Should NBC Ditch Olympics Announcers?” by Heather Horn | The Atlantic Wire
I found myself wondering something similar when I heard TSN’s James Duthie recite the lyrics to Kool and the Gang’s “Ladies’ Night” — without the slightest hint of irony — while describing Canadian female athletes’ four-medal performance on Wednesday.

6. “Bullies in public office” by Eric Mang | rabble.ca
Bullying extends beyond the schoolyard; it often rears an ugly fist in the political arena. Mang, who served as an aide in both the Ontario and B.C. provincial governments, laments how foul-mouthed, hot-headed types often rise to the top at the expense of others.

7. “The Science Guy Takes on Climate Change Deniers” by Alicia Capetillo | GOOD Main
Climate change denial is like a sunburn that refuses to heal. Even Conservative MPs are getting in on the act, despite the Harper government’s official position that global warming is a real and serious threat. Who better to step to the plate to defend real science than Bill “The Science Guy” Nye?

8. “The Italian (Boob) Job” by Margaret Wheeler Johnson | XX Factor
In what must be a distorted form of feminism, breast augmentation has been the springboard for the political careers of many female Italian politicians. While the Italian parliament considers a ban on such procedures for minors, Johnson investigates the country’s strange relationship between breasts and politics.

9. “Leaner, Meaner Innovation” by April Dunford | The Mark
Venture capital firms have been tightening their belts recently, providing less money for start-ups than ever before. This dearth of funds is leading firms to develop business models that, while costing less, offer a better chance of success by engaging customers at an earlier stage of development.

10. “When Canada flouts its own aid promises, we fail Haitians — again” by Graham F. Scott | This Magazine
Canada is first in the world in per capita donations to post-earthquake Haiti, and second only to the United States in overall giving. However, this does not give us license to pat ourselves on the back. Haiti was in trouble before the disaster, Scott reminds, and there is much work left to be done.

(Illustration by What To Do?)

PARIS — “So, uh, what have people over there been saying about the Games?”

My dad, who lives on Vancouver Island and spent the first couple days of the Olympics in Vancouver proper, asked me the other day for the French take on the games-to-date. Even over a shitty ADSL connection some nine time zones away, I could tell that he wasn’t just curious. He was a little worried. He needed to be reassured.

This was after the first week of the Olympics, when a few macro things weren’t going as well as people had hoped they would, so to speak. Like the weather. And safety on the luge track. And the torch lighting.

Based on what I was hearing from friends and family, folks in Vancouver were having a ball. Actually, I sort of got the impression that Canadians were almost overdoing their we’re-here-for-the-party! bit, to compensate for what they perceived as a lukewarm early reception of the Games abroad (driven pretty largely, let’s be honest, by the bitter, snarky reports of an inexplicably and indefensibly hateful segment of the British media that nobody should ever take seriously, especially since they started trashing these Olympics two weeks before they even began).

I assured my dad that the French media was taking a largely positive view on the games. It might be because French people are generally rooting for Canada to do well at these Olympics, since many of our athletes give interviews en français to their reporters, or that they won a bunch of medals in the first week (because if the French care about anything, it’s winning medals – they’re a lot like my brother that way).

But just in case my dad, or the rest of Canada, needed any more insight on what the world really thinks about these Olympics, I called on my Sportstrotter network of international gurus, spies and n’er-do-wells, spread across five continents, in countries with varying levels of participation in winter sports, to give their own far-flung perspectives on the games.

(Happy birthday, dad.)

Andrew Braithwaite – Paris, France (Pacific Standard Time + 9 Hours)

Yes, even though the rest of the entries are going east-to-west, I get the primo first-responder priority Platinum placement, part of this column’s controversial “Own the Blog” program (for which my corporate fat-cat sponsor has invested a generous $0.0 million dollars).

If there’s one thing that I’ve taken from the largely excellent (and unabashedly homerist) live television coverage on France 2 and France 3, which runs nightly from 18h local time till 6h the next morning – completely commercial free after 20h30! – it’s that after all the glory paid to Canada’s top musical talents at the Opening Ceremonies, we need to make a bigger deal of the musical phenomenon that is Roch Voisine. I remember listening to this guy in my French elementary school. In Francophone music, he’s huge. Not quite Céline Dion or Gilles Vigneault huge. Still, here’s a guy who was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France at age 28!

Why will I remembered these as “the Roch Voisine Games?” Two reasons: one, the theme song for France Televisions’ Olympics coverage is Voisine’s insufferably catchy 1989 song “Pour Une Victoire,” from his hit debut album Hélène (translation of the chorus: “for a victory, you would do anything,” a very French Olympic sentiment). Two, Roch has been the third man in the TV booth for every Team Canada hockey game. And the amazing thing is that he’s not just making a celebrity cameo. He’s a really good colour analyst. Or maybe he just seems smart because I’m usually watching hockey at 3 in the morning.

Seth Leighton – Seoul, Korea (PST+17)

I rode the subway to work on Wednesday. On the subway in Korea, nobody talks. Even among packs of school kids, it is customary for each to be focused on their own phone. Today, things were different. Strangers clustered around each others’ tiny Samsung screens, watching the competitors of Kim Yu-Na, our 19 year old figure skating superduperstar.

Yu-Na represents the extremes of Korean culture, with its contrast of traditional Confucianism and desire for modernity at any cost. From an early age she was motivated/pushed by her mother, who has completely devoted herself to her child’s success – a common trait in Korean families. The use of a foreign teacher is another trait deeply embedded within Korean culture, one that hits directly against the national pride. Yu-Na’s coach? Canadian Brian Orser.

I reached my stop 3 minutes before Yu-Na’s short program skate. Passing an open health clinic, I saw a TV tuned to the event – Che-ga Pol Su Isseo?, I asked (“Can I watch?”). I sat next to two old Korean men, patients waiting for the doctor, who stood at the door, also watching. Each of Yu-Na’s jumps was followed by claps and cheers from my fellow observers, and nary a breath was taken until she finished her performance without a fall.

They announced the score: 78.50, a new world record for short program. Cheers broke out, people hugged and laughed, and then, because they are Korean, everybody went back to work.

Anamitra Deb – Mumbai, India (PST+14)

I’ve been looking forward to these Olympics ever since my friend Kate gifted me a Vancouver 2010 vest and toque, passed along by her mother who was on the organizing committee. However, I fear our chance at winter sports greatness is passing India by.

Despite a three-man delegation tipped by the bookies at very, very long odds, and live sports coverage on ESPN, India stubbornly remains loyal to its unholy news trinity of cricket/Bollywood/sex scandals. Though the Olympics did get off to a scandalous start, when it was revealed that our three-man delegation had a five-man entourage that included an adventurous hotelier from Kashmir, Muddasir Nazir Mir, who has no credentials as a coach – he’s apparently riding a political favour into Whistler Olympic Park, aiding army man Tashi Lundup (whose actual coach was sidelined to accommodate Mr. Nazir Mir) to an 83rd-place finish in the men’s 15km freestyle cross-country.

These will most likely be remembered as Mr. Nazir Mir’s Olympics. And I, equipped with only my hopes and my vest, will be, like India’s delegation, relegated to the snowbank of history.

Amy Romkey – Dubai, UAE (PST+12)

Olympics? There are Olympics?!?! I heard a rumour there was some big event going on in Canada! The television programming over here is pretty abysmal. You can see bits and pieces of Olympic coverage on the odd European channel or CNN but there isn’t any coverage on local stations or news. Ditto for coverage in the local newspapers. My husband and I have a new neighbour who moved here from Vancouver, just in time to miss the Olympics. He is dedicated and wakes up at 4:30am to watch Canada play hockey. We have yet to accept one of his invitations to join. It’s just not the same watching on a little laptop. And since no one over here is really talking about the Olympics, you don’t really miss it.

Marten Lodewijks – Johannesburg, South Africa (PST+10)

Africa and snow are not usually two words one would put down in the same sentence (Mount Kilimanjaro aside). I think for this reason the Winter Olympics are viewed as more of an interesting thing happening half a world away than an actual competition that we might conceivably compete in. Having said all that I love watching the games. Sadly they are not broadcast live but rather in highlights packages in the evenings but I do enjoy the Giant Slalom and Super G (as much for the spectacular crashes as the skill involved) as well as the figure skating and luge. I must be honest and say that as much skill as it might require, curling is as interesting as watching a snail cross the living room. Just don’t get it…

As for Vancouver’s organizational problems, we have a pretty big tournament of our own coming up. Anyone who thinks the World Cup in SA will be as punctual as in Germany or as well organized as in Korea/Japan is smoking their socks. There will be delays, there will be blackouts, there will be parking nightmares but this is Africa and there will also be a magic and a passion that you cannot replicate in the northern hemisphere. Unlike Canada’s hockey team, South Africa has the advantage of very low expectations and I think the world will be pleasantly surprised.

David Lizoain – Barcelona, Spain (PST+9)

Barcelona has come down with Winter Olympic fever in the worst way, celebrating the games by announcing its own proposal to submit a Barcelona-Pyrenees bid for the 2022 games. This came as a surprise to everyone, especially the already existing Spanish bid next door in Aragon. Everyone agrees that the 1992 Summer Olympics here were a huge success. Tomorrow’s weather is forecast for a high of 18C. On the other hand, if you ship some snow to the mountains, build an unnecessary bobsleigh course, and a couple of ice palaces in the city, what more do you need?

Up until now, Spain’s most glorious Winter Olympic moment was in 2002 when Johann Mühlegg won a couple of couple of cross-country golds and then got busted for doping at the third race. Up until his fall from grace everyone was calling him Juanito and the King called to congratulate him. Now he’s back to being Johann. He’s like a Spanish version of Ben Johnson.

I remain convinced that the only useful thing about the Winter Olympics is that they are a great excuse to stage a World Cup of hockey. I have no time for all the variations on who can vertically drop the fastest with a few turns thrown in. Galileo already proved that, Who cares, it’s all the same.

Respect to the biathletes for their proud defense of doing two sports at once.

Paul Isaacs – London, UK (PST+8)

The British reaction to the Olympics has been understated to the point of seemingly not caring at all. Sometimes, stiff upper lips are just a politer way of saying we don’t give a fuck. The fact that we’ve only won a single gold medal (putting us behind such comedy punchline counties as Belarus and Slovenia) of course has nothing to do with it. Actually, we’re so worried about screwing up our own Olympics in 2012, your Vancouver catastrophes look like small beer. And besides, at least your Olympic logo doesn’t look like an obscene Simpsons gif.

Alex Frastacky – Quito, Ecuador (PST+3)

I watched the Canada/Russia hockey game last night at a bar with some Ecuadorian friends. There weren’t that many bars showing the game – in fact, this particular bar wasn’t showing the game either, until we came in and turned it on ourselves. Without DirectTV, you don’t get the Olympics in Ecuador.

Ecuador doesn’t have any athletes in the games. They like to watch it on TV, though, and cheer for random countries like Germany and Sweden. Canada, too – my friend Sebas thinks Whistler looks amazing. Last night I tried to explain (poorly) the rules of hockey. It wasn’t really working so I told them to just think of it as soccer on ice. That seemed to work. Between periods we flipped over to a soccer match, rather than watching any other Olympic Sports.

Matt Lynch – Chicago, USA (PST+2)

It’s hard not to be a tiny bit bitter after Chicago’s 2016 Summer Games bid flopped, so I can’t say I haven’t taken some cruel enjoyment in Vancouver’s struggles at things like “lighting the Olympic flame” and “having ice and snow.” I’m not one to plan my schedule around speed skating or biathalon or anything, but it’s been nice to see the American team perform well thus far. Still, a strong Olympic performance tends to give me mixed feelings because, while I want my country to do well just like anyone else, I feel like it only increases the already robust worldwide resentment of Team America.

Take “USA 5, Canada 3,” for instance. I realize it was a preliminary game, and that the Americans were significantly outplayed everywhere except between the pipes, but damn, that was fun. I could see Canada exacting its revenge later in the tournament in a cruel, cruel way, but who knows? One thing I do know is that the “Own The Podium” strategy has kind of gone bust.

If USA Hockey were to somehow win gold, I’d at least get some revenge for all the snide, “when we win, it’s not a miracle” ribbing we’ve taken on behalf of our beloved 1980 squad from certain Canadians, some of whom may or may not write this blog. If that happens, I’ll probably also wait a few months before I risk partaking of any imported Labatt Blue or Molson.

Margie “Auntie Travelin’ Marge” Matiets – Vancouver, Canada (PST)

Vancouver is like a two-week solar flare. The energy here is amazing – the people who are here for the Olympics are so passionate! Smiles everywhere. It feels very united, very universal. So much pride, such a feeling of privilege to be hosting these people. We’re givin’ er! Gotta get that hockey gold! The whole city is teeming with people. I’ve never seen it like this before, such long lines for everything. Not enough porta-potties.

Vancouver is surreal right now. It’s nice.

(Image courtesy Eric Lon)

By the end of the opening credits of the first episode of MTV’s The Buried Life, the concept seems so attractive, so engaging, so right now, that it’s easy to imagine the studio meeting where it was pitched:

Okay, here’s the setup: four twenty-something guys make a list of 100 things they’d like to do before they die, and we send a film crew to capture their exploits. Maybe they’re in a van — no, a bus — cruising, listening to hip hop. They’re kind of rascally, a little outdoorsy, a little West Coast. They’re smart, not self-indulgent. Maybe they’re even Canadian. Here’s the kicker: every time they accomplish something on the list, they help a stranger they’ve met along the way. Boom! — everybody’s happy.

Apparently, everybody was. MTV ordered a pilot, then a full eight-episode season, with premises ranging from standard-issue fluff (“ask out the girl of your dreams”) to the startlingly sincere (“help deliver a baby”). Since its January 18 premiere, The Buried Life has received killer promotion and, relative to cable standards, record-breaking audiences. In a front-page article, the New York Times cast the show as “MTV for the era of Obama.” (No kidding: tonight’s episode is about an attempt to play basketball with the U.S. president.) There’s nothing else like it on television.

The Buried Life is created, produced, edited and even promoted by its four stars from British Columbia: Ben Nemtin, Dave Lingwood, and brothers Duncan and Jonnie Penn. The bucket list? They started it in 2006, and crossed off twenty-four items in the making of an independent documentary that caught MTV’s attention. The show’s name? Inspired by an 1852 Matthew Arnold poem. The foursome’s bus, christened Penelope? They bought her from a nudist in Vancouver.

During a recent conference call with the castmates, Ben describes the eight-episode run on MTV as only the latest turn for a project that has already grown beyond the quartet’s wildest imaginations. “We were offered a show in 2007, but we turned it down because we weren’t going to be able to control the creative process. We started this [project] as a way to showcase the potential of a group of friends, and it was crucial for us to maintain that vision,” he tells me. “This time MTV came to us and said, ‘We want to pick up what you’ve been doing for the last four years, and we won’t touch it.’ So we produced it, we edited it, we chose the music. It’s still our baby.”

Indeed, The Buried Life has a degree of warmth and familiarity that’s absent from most of its neighbours in the reality television ’hood. (“We have difficulty calling this a reality show,” Jonnie politely interjects when I raise the term. “It’s more of a docu-series — Gonzo cinema.”) A few years ago, a series this earnest might have come across as schmaltzy. But the world is different now. “In the past two decades we’ve had boy bands and George Bush, and we know where all of that led,” Jonnie says. “Now people are asking for something else.”

The Buried Life might be the first big-deal youth program to focus on that “something” — to study it, cater to it, and harness its potential. From the very beginning, the group’s website has invited visitors to comment on the original list and, better yet, build new lists of their own. Related Facebook and Twitter pages offer additional means for contact. “People are craving a different kind of connection, a more interactive one,” Jonnie says. “It’s clear that young people want to participate; they jump at the opportunity to get involved. It’s not enough anymore just to watch.”

Each member of the group has his favourite list item and, likely, his favourite part of their newfound fame. All four have similar things to say about the way their list addresses happiness, satisfaction, and accomplishment. “Those things aren’t destinations. You don’t just get there and everything’s perfect,” says Duncan. “Maybe the thrill is in the chase, maybe it’s not, but that’s what was missing from our lives before — we didn’t take chances. We were craving the opportunity to do more, but we weren’t doing it.  Now we’ve made it to a different place.”

Jonnie concurs. “This is bigger than us, and it’s something anybody can relate to, connect to, interpret. That’s why the project found success: it transcends generations and gender,” he says.

Can it really be so simple? Ben reminds me about list item no. 53: make a television show. “We’re proud of what we’ve done, but at the end of the day [the MTV series] is just an item on the list,” he says. “Hopefully it will be a good way to get the word out on the project, but what keeps us going is support from our online community — people posting their own lists on our website or Facebook, the conversations we start and the connections we make.

“We’re just getting started. We’ve got big plans.”

(Image courtesy of theburiedlife.com)