Notices by allan (allan@mastodon.club), page 12

@opendork aw, that sucks. I hope you feel better soon! 😷

I often find ginger tea helps...

I'm loving these groovy old pneumatic things from the early 20th c. Here is an Alberta coal mine's air powered train. It's a largely forgotten piece of industrial history between steam and electricity. So this would be what, air-punk?

One quibble is that it makes it seem like bath house raids and other forms of police harassment were a thing in the 80s and then no more.

The last raid on Goliath's, in Calgary, was in 2002. The same year Ontario upheld same sex marriage rights.

xtra has a timeline of the last 50 years of LGBTQ+ rights in Canada https://www.dailyxtra.com/looking-back-at-the-past-50-years-of-lgbtq2-activism-in-canada-156427

It's very eastern Canada focused, a lot on raids and protests in Toronto and Montreal not so much on anywhere else. Nonetheless it's a nice reminder that there's more to queer history and civil rights than Stonewall.

@ink_slinger this is the one political issue that I know you care about.

@ink_slinger According to the CBC there'll be no drinking in city picnic areas, I guess you'll just have to drink at home, alone.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/councillors-liquor-law-proposal-1.5172977

@chidgey oh yes. In some of what I've been reading it was already suffering from over-tourism in the 1920s, and things haven't improved much.

On the plus side the Canadian Rockies are vast and the majority of the tourists don't venture much further than Banff. So it's like a sacrificial mountain town keeping the trails clear for the rest of us.

In Edmonton quite literally, there used to be coal mines running under downtown, to the consternation of anyone digging foundations or lrt tunnels today.

For more history of mineral exploitation in Edmonton try ep 34 of Let's Find Out and listen to Edmonton's former historian laureate take me on a journey in which I discover that the real mineral wealth left by retreating glaciers were the friends we found along the way https://letsfindoutpodcast.com/2019/05/29/episode-34-the-dredge-report/

On a certain level coal in Alberta is a cautionary tale. Coal mining of some description was done essentially everywhere in Alberta, and the province is full of those ghost towns. Within a single persons working life towns were founded, populated, and reduced to scattered foundations and dusty paths that used to be main street.

Now we're an oil and gas province and that seems so permanent. But then again so did coal, and the coal is still there under our feet, we just don't mine it any more.

I am reading a book on the history of coal mining in Alberta because I am hip and cool and definitely not a boring person with boring interests.

The town of Bankhead, for example, only existed for 20 years before being carted away. It was a full on town with a school, library, and a power plant (they had electricity before Banff and actually most people in Alberta!) but after a strike in the 1920s the mine closed and the Minister responsible for the park ordered the town removed.

Why were these towns ordered destroyed (and by what super villain exactly?)? Turns out mining was allowed in (what is now) Banff *after* it was made a national park in 1885 and before the 1930 National Park Act.

Mines were opened, mining towns built, and all was good until the 1920s or so when people got a little ehh on mining in the park. So once a mining town fell on hard times the feds stepped in and ordered it destroyed. But the buildings were still good hence being all moved to Banff.

Weird fact that I learned today: The town of Banff is made up of at least 4 other towns that used to exist in the park.

Banff didn't expand and take them over. Those towns were ordered destroyed and the houses and businesses were picked up from their original locations and moved to Banff.

Every year in June The Memory Palace re-posts this episode, A White Horse http://thememorypalace.us/2016/06/a-white-horse/

It is my favourite, which is saying something as The Memory Palace is an incomparably good podcast.

@keithzg @ink_slinger which pairs nicely with 🍑

@thurloat @ink_slinger the universe is glad that you didn't.

@kai I used to just lay in front of the TV and kind of watch nothing? Now I only watch specific shows I want to see when it is convenient, because I only get my TV through my laptop.

I also go see a lot more movies in theatre now 🤷

@codewiz the air quality here is currently good (http://airquality.alberta.ca/map/) but I think the long term forecast is for wildfire smoke to return, then it usually gets really bad really quickly.

I think that air monitoring data is more available is really going to change how we think about pollution. It used to be invisible, so we didn't think about it, now that we can see the problem we can start agitating for change.

Though with wildfires I'm not sure what we can do 🤔

@kai I got rid of my TV years ago and yeah, I definitely read more books. But there's also a limit when I just get bored and don't want to have to think about anything...

I think maybe we've just internalized all the old people yelling at clouds and in the future we'll look back all nostalgic for the internet like some people are for books

I came upon this upon walking outside, so yep, confirmed, no more breathing for me. Breathing, not even once.