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I’m in the middle of a pretty excellent book at the moment called The Checklist Manifesto, written by a surgeon named Atul Gawande. It’s “a gripping exploration of the nature of complexity on our lives and essential reading for anyone working to get things right.” So yeah, it’s got an endorsement from Malcolm Gladwell on the back cover.

Jokes aside, it’s good stuff, and I’ll tell you more about it once I’ve finished it. But in the meantime, I’d like to share a quick excerpt dealing with the last thing I expected to read about in a book like this: the infamous Van Halen rider clause calling for “no brown M&M’s.”

“Listening to the radio,” Gawande explains, “I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth‘s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse.

“As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, ‘Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors – whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.’

“So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. ‘When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,’ he wrote, ‘well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.’

“These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.”

As much as I like his music, it isn’t often that I’m compelled to admit that David Lee Roth might be a genius. But you know what? That’s pretty brilliant.

The reason I’m linking to the St. Lawrence Centre is to tell you about Poetic Fashion, which I’ve mentioned in this space before. It’s a great event, and one of just many amazing things happening under the Literature for Life umbrella.

I do hope you’ll check it out. Tickets can be purchased in advance through the St. Lawrence Centre’s website. Stay tuned to this space for more following the event.

I haven’t really written much about the gun registry issue during the past few days. Hell, I haven’t even been able to keep up with some of the more recent comments that have been posted on this blog about the gun registry. But it’s not for lack of new developments, and over the course of the next couple of days, I’ll try and catch up.

One of the first things I’ll need to do is get caught up on all the news, blog postings and crosstalk that’s been floating around on the web about this issue – and thankfully, I’ve got a fairly easy way in which to do that.

If you’ve ever set up a Google Alert before, then you know how useful they can be when it comes to following an issue online. For the newbies, these alerts are just “email updates of the latest relevant Google results… based on your choice of query or topic.”

Enter the search term of your choice – like “gun registry,” for example – and each day you’ll receive an email containing the latest results for that term. I’ve had emails like that piling up in my inbox for the past couple of weeks, and it all adds up to a pretty good chunk of reading.

A lot of it’s going to overlap, of course, and some of it surely ought to be taken with a grain of salt – including the few posts of mine included in recent alerts, which I guess I don’t need to read again. But I’ll try to get on top of the bulk of it as soon as possible, and I’ll link to some of the highlights here as they continue to unfold.

One of the finest comic book shops in town. Hell, one of the finest comic book shops in any number of towns, I’d say.

Chart recently granted me the opportunity to review the new Underworld album, which will hit the shelves in a couple of weeks. The review hasn’t been published yet, but once it has, you’ll find that I singled out the good work of a number of producers whose work appears on the disc – including Mark Knight and D. Ramirez.

These guys worked on two of the album’s best tracks – one of which, “Always Loved a Film,” has just been released as a single. But this wasn’t the first time these artists had gotten together. One of their more notable collaborations was a single called “Downpipe,” which was released last year.

I’ve had this one in my headphones for the past couple of days, and it’s a great one. It’s a rich, bouncy club track combining driving beats, nicely effected synths, and Karl Hyde’s usual brand of “stream of consciousness” lyrics. The accompanying instrumental dub version doesn’t add a whole lot to the original, but it’s worth a listen in its own right.

If you buy club music online, and you’re not already shopping at Beatport, then I highly recommend it.

Beatport boasts a diverse catalog and a fairly seamless purchasing and downloading process. The prices aren’t too shabby, and you’ll find a lot of stuff that’s not available through the iTunes store or other such services. You can also take advantage of a number of additional features; the option of flagging your favourite artists and being notified of new releases when you visit again is especially useful.

They also offer a number of feeds that encourage you to preview a lot of great music that you otherwise might never hear. I’m currently following their Top 100 and Top 100 Classics feeds, and I’ve gotten to hear some pretty great stuff as a result.

Big thanks to my friend Tallulah for taking the time this week to become my latest sponsor in the AIDS Walk for Life next month. Good on you, Tallulah!

We still have a bit of a way to go if we’re going to meet my revised fundraising goal. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, then I invite you to visit my fundraising page, through which you can donate online. Thanks!

You’d be surprised how many people reacted to the news that I’m in Ottawa for a couple of days – on my own, and not on a business trip or anything – by asking me if everything’s okay at home.

Everything’s great at home, guys! In many ways, in fact, we’re better than ever! Can’t a guy take a couple of days off alone, away from the hustle and bustle of a busy but nonetheless awesome summer, with the hope of coming back feeling more relaxed and present than ever? Plenty of happy couples do this sort of thing all the time!

Hell, Kate’s already planning to book a couple of weeks off in April to do some exploring, by herself, on the other side of the world. And I swear to God, if I have to listen to a bunch of “Why’d your wife leave you, dude?” the whole time she’s gone, then there’s no telling what town I’m going to run off to for a couple of days. Maybe Kingston, which is lovely!

At any rate, it’s been a good time, and although it’s always a drag to bring an end to even a brief vacation, I’m excited about getting home late tomorrow night. And I’m even more excited about the fact that Kate and I will be doing our next trip together. But I’m really glad I got to take this trip, and I’ve got nearly a full day left in which to make the most of it. So far, so good!

If you head a few blocks south from my office in Toronto, you’ll get to City Hall. If you head a few blocks west, you’ll get to Queen’s Park. For those of you from out of town, the former’s obviously home to my municipal representatives, and the latter’s home to my provincial representatives.

The missing piece of the puzzle is Parliament Hill, the seat of our federal government. And instead of being at my office today, I’m in Ottawa, sitting right outside Parliament on an extraordinarily hot day.

This is it, guys! The place where good things are theoretically supposed to happen for Canada and its citizens! Where the bells ring constantly, and you’d better not walk on the grass!

“Democracy in modern nation-states almost always takes the form of ‘representative’ democracy,” James Laxer writes in the first chapter of Democracy: A Groundwork Guide. “That is to say, the citizens elect officeholders at various levels (municipal, state or provincial, federal or national), and those elected serve as the representatives of the people.”

When we talk about the history of democracy, we tend to look back to ancient Athens, where the whole idea is said to have been introduced. But the Athenian system of government was one of “direct” democracy, and it was much different from what the West practices today.

“In Athens,” Laxer says, “the Assembly, attended by all citizens who were in the city and able to be present, met ten times a year and held additional meetings when necessary… Thousands of citizens took part in these meetings, and for certain types of decisions a quorum of six thousand citizens had to be in attendance.”

The Assembly was supplemented by a Council of Five Hundred, who were chosen by lottery every year from among the citizens who were at least thirty years of age. They prepared draft legislation for the Assembly, and in some cases they put it into effect. There was also an early court system featuring juries but no judges.

The long and the short of it was that there were no middlemen in the Athenian system. Each and every citizen of Athens was encouraged – hell, required – to participate in shaping his own society.

Now, when I say “his,” I mean “his.” When we talk about these few thousand citizens, we’re talking about “perhaps 20 percent of adults,” because slaves, women, children and non-citizens weren’t allowed to get involved. And even if we were to include all of those people, we’d be talking about a much smaller population than Canada’s, or even Toronto’s, for which such a system would arguably be far too unwieldy.

“To the Athenian citizens of those times,” Laxer stresses nonetheless, “the system of democracy that exists in nation-states today would seem highly undemocratic. They would be deeply suspicious of a system in which millions of citizens living in a large territory elect professional politicians from competing political parties to represent them. How can you trust such politicians? they would lament. And how can you entrust them with so much power for such long periods of time?

“To the practitioners of direct democracy (a system that could work in theory in a small city-state today, with all citizens having the right to participate), representative democracy appears to permit the citizen to do little more than vote every few years, while leaving the actual passing of legislation up to the professionals.”

If you’ve ever felt powerless to do something about an issue that means something to you, and you’ve felt like your representatives aren’t doing enough on your behalf, then Laxer isn’t telling you anything you don’t already know here. It’s all to common for citizens of representative democracies to feel like their government doesn’t actually represent them. And in Canada in 2010, where we’re ruled by a minority government elected by the lowest voter turnout in our country’s history, it’s safe to say that most of us feel that way to some degree.

To be fair, there are other ways to get involved and do your part. Laxer goes on to describe a number of democracy’s other tenets, and in doing so he paints a broader picture of civic engagement than the limited role of voting every now and then.

“Democracy includes the rights of wage and salary earners to organize unions to represent them and to go on strike to bargain with their employers for higher salaries and better working conditions. It involves as well the rights of citizens, not only to elect governments and to run for office, but to petition those in power, to hold mass demonstrations to make their views known, and to organize themselves into the many bodies and institutions that comprise ‘civil society,’ which are neither a part of the state nor of the marketplace.”

And by the way, here’s one for the backers of measures like Proposition 8 in California and SB 1070 in Arizona: “While democracy encompasses the rights of majorities to do many important things, it does not encompass the right to discriminate against or to abuse minorities.” That, to paraphrase Vincent Vega, is a right the citizens in a democracy don’t have.

At any rate, the representative form of democracy that we enjoy – or rail against, or what have you – may not be as “democratic” as the direct systems of democracy practiced in early city-states. But one could just as easily argue that those systems just aren’t practical when it comes to, say, a nation of thirty-four million people spread across one of the largest land masses in the world.

Perhaps it’s best to say that we could learn a lot, and even take a few cues, from the direct democracies of old. Call me an idealist, but I say there’s no such thing as a finished product when it comes to politics and government, and we can always do more to make our systems more representative, just and efficient.

It’s also got to be said – and it has been said by many during the past couple of decades – that even our representative democratic system is just a contender for power in our country and others like it. But let’s call that a conversation for another day. After all, I’m on vacation.

I didn’t post any links yesterday, because I was a bit too busy tearing down after Guelph and getting ready to head to Ottawa. Oh, what a life I lead!

So today, let’s give you two links instead of the usual one. The first is Human Rights Watch, which offers a wide range of RSS feeds. I follow their general news feed, and it’s a pretty intense look at some of the more troubling things happening in the world.

The second is Amnesty International, which offers a range of feeds of its own. Try their news and updates feed and their appeals for action feed.

Wow, that was a lot more than two links! And probably not the sunniest way to start your week, but still!