Christian Cinema, Ideas, Popular Culture

Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise. Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times. The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christian Cinema, Popular Culture and Ideas

Woodlawn is a potent mix of Deep South high school football set against a backdrop of racial tension and the early 1970s Jesus movement

Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

It’s a pretty impressive list.

Woodlawn, released last October, is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 97, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review last September after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Time

Time dilation, Daylight Saving Time and Other Mysteries of Time

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past.

I had a very odd experience, more akin to what Kern wrote about 33 years ago than Einsteinian physics, I suppose, where time was a product of perception – in this instance slowing down, rather than speeding up – back on Feb. 9, 2015, when I began working as a library clerk on the new Thompson campus of University College of the North (UCN) at the intersection of Thompson Drive North and UCN Drive.

I decided, probably not wisely in retrospect, to bicycle to work my first night, taking the then newly paved but snow-covered two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that then ran pretty much from behind my house all the way down to UCN (it now runs even further to Cree Road). While I had been riding all winter, very little of it until that point had been on the multi-use boulevard pathway toward UCN. I was also using an unfamiliar bicycle with some chain-dropping problems that first night.

The result was too little time and heavy exertion, not wanting to be late for work my first night. I thought I had given myself plenty of time for my 6:30 p.m. start, but conditions were more adverse than I anticipated. The ride is two kilometres, the last half kilometre or so from about the Giant Tiger department store to campus.

I distinctly remember checking the wristwatch on my left wrist four of five times under street lights as I pushed as hard as I could that last half-kilometre stretch. The oddest thing was the first three or four times, the hands on the analog display showed 6:28 p.m. – as if time was standing still, although my bicycle was in motion with me aboard. It wasn’t until I got to the door at UCN, the watch seemed to move that last two minutes to show exactly 6:30 p.m. on the dot. I have no rational explanation for what happened. Did the minute hand on my watch get stuck briefly and then free itself and jump ahead the two minutes? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like that.

Speaking of rational, under Manitoba’s Official Time Act, Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins on the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November. That means it begins tomorrow. How rational Daylight Saving Time is; well that continues to be a matter of some debate.

The official time change to Daylight Saving Time occurs at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 13, at which time clocks should be set ahead to 3 a.m.

While it has been gradually remaining lighter later in the evening since late December here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re about to get an even bigger early evening light boost Sunday. Tonight the sun sets here in Thompson, Manitoba at Latitude 56° 19.8′ North at 6:31 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST), according to National Research Council (NRC) of Canada calculations. Tomorrow sunset here is at 7:33 p.m. Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT). Presto! In the course of a single day, we’ve picked up another hour and two minutes of daylight in the evening. And by the time the spring equinox arrives March 20 here in Thompson, we’ll be seeing about the same amount of hours of daylight as night, with sunrise at 7:33 a.m., and sunset at 7:48 p.m. Come the summer solstice June 20, don’t be surprised if we’re out on the dock at the Paint Lake Marina, a bit south of here, fishing until almost 11 p.m., as sunset won’t be until 10:26 p.m., while the end of civil twilight, defined as the centre of the sun’s disk at six degrees below the horizon, and the limit at which illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under good atmospheric conditions, won’t be for more than an hour later at 11:30 p.m. CDT.

While fishing until midnight on the dock sounds pretty appealing right about now, as Lucas Powers pointed out earlier today in an interesting online CBC News story headlined “Daylight saving time 2016: How big business benefits from more sunshine. Longer daylight time has nothing to do with saving energy or benefiting farmers, critics say, which you can read at http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/daylight-saving-business-energy-1.3485281, as it outlines how the biggest long-time (pardon the pun) advocates for Daylight Saving Time over the years has been no other than the big business lobby. Tufts University professor Michael Downing wrote a book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, on the phenomena 10 years ago.

The Alexandria, Virginia-based Association for Convenience & Petroleum Retailing, formerly known as the National Association of Convenience Stores, founded in August 1961, loves Daylight Saving Time. Likewise big-box stores, sporting and recreational goods manufacturers, barbecue and charcoal retailers, lawn and garden retailers, shopping malls and golf courses. Surprise.

For this, we can thank (or blame) George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island, and, in all fairness, Hudson could hardly be accused of being a shill for big business. They just picked up on Hudson’s idea in time, so to speak, and ran with it.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, a principal research officer in the Frequency and Time group, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°” to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October. The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.

The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also uses DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer, keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone. Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 13 this year or any when March day when Standard Time meets Daylight Saving Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Journalism

Who’d a thunk it? Readers says it’s a toss-up when it comes to whether robo-journalists write better than human journalists

OK … we’ve all heard the phrase “fishwrap” applied derogatorily by critics assessing the quality of newspapers wherever they live from time to time. Methinks some weeks that does a disservice to how my favourite pickerel from Paint Lake should be treated, but it isn’t just local newspapers that are problematically bad at times. Take the venerable Associated Press, affectionately known by working journos simply as the AP. They managed to move this alert last Wednesday: “BC-APNewsAlert/17. New York Yankees Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Bear has died. He was 90.” Actually, Yogi Bear, the beloved Hanna-Barbera cartoon character is only 57. He was created in 1958, making his début as a supporting character in The Huckleberry Hound Show, and was the first breakout character created by Hanna-Barbera and was eventually more popular than Huckleberry Hound.

Yogi Berra, the beloved baseball player, on the other hand, was created in 1924 and born in 1925. A native of St. Louis, Berra signed with the New York Yankees in 1943 before serving in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. He made his major league début in 1946 and was a stalwart in the Yankees’ lineup during the team’s championship years in the 1940s and 1950s.

Berra was a power hitter and strong defensive catcher. He caught Yankees’ pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game on Oct. 8, 1956, in Game 5 of the 1956 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, the only perfect game in Major League Baseball (MLB) post-season history. After playing 18 seasons with the Yankees, Berra retired following the 1963 season. Berra was also famous for his string of truisms, tautologies and malapropisms, including “Nobody goes there any more; it’s too crowded,” along with, “It ain’t over til it’s over” or, “Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked,” as well as, “Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true” and, “If you ask me anything I don’t know, I’m not going to answer.” My personal favourite, which I managed to inject into several columns, editorials or news stories over the years, was the well-known, “This is like déjà vu all over again,” which I had used again as recently as Aug. 24, less than a month before Yogi Berra died.

It was while I was pondering how a boo boo like the Yogi Bear/Yogi Berra obituary mix-up happens in journalism (I suspect the eagle-eyed Ranger John Francis Smith from Jellystone Park would have known the difference) that I came across the latest information on robo-journalism (not to be mixed up with Tory robo-calls during the 2011 federal election campaign, I should point out to my friends still remaining in Canadian journalism.) Turns out that unlike most human journalists, who are for the most part seriously mathematically challenged, robot journalists that already work for such illustrious newspapers as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes, the storied business magazine, have shown a natural aptitude for data, making them ideal for the sports and business desks, and as such are now about ready to branch out into breaking news and investigative journalism.

Neil Sharman (believed to be a human writer) and former head of research and insight at Telegraph Media Group on Buckingham Palace Road in London, writing Sept. 22 in TheMediaBriefing, also based in London, noted that robots, “Like junior reporters … can learn from and draw on a back catalogue of great writing – but with more powerful memories and analytical techniques.” You can read Sharman’s full piece here: http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/robo-journalism-the-future-is-arriving-quickly

“Machines are adept at investigating data sets,” Sharman says. “Publishers have set them to tax records, homicide data, meteorological reports and more –looking for patterns and describing them. They’re thorough, not prone to error and they’re fast.

“The LA Times uses robo-journalism to break news about earthquakes because machines can analyse geological survey data faster than a human. It takes under five minutes to spot a story and get it online.”

Tim Adams, a staff writer for the “The Observer: The New Review” at London’s The Guardian newspaper, wrote a piece June 28 on Kris Hammond, a professor of journalism and computer science at Northwestern University and co-founder and chief scientist at Chicago-based Narrative Science, which developed a writing program for robots known as “Quill.” Hammond also founded the University of Chicago’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He told Adams, “we are humanizing the machine and giving it the ability not only to look at data but, based on general ideas of what is important and a close understanding of who the audience is, we are giving it the tools to know how to tell us stories.”

Adams observes, “It’s not deathless prose – at least not yet; the machines are still ‘learning’ day by day how to write effectively – but it’s already good enough to replace the jobs once done by wire reporters. Narrative Science’s computers provide daily market reports for Forbes as well sports reports for the Big Ten sports network. Hammond predicts that 90 per cent of journalism will be written by computer by 2030. Automated Insights, one of Narrative Sciences competitors, based in Durham, North Carolina, does all the data-based stock reports for AP.

Adams also notes that “last year, a Swedish media professor, Christer Clerwall, conducted the first proper blind study into how sports reports written by computers and by humans compared. Readers taking part in the study suggested, on the whole, that the reports written by human sports journalists were slightly more accessible and enjoyable, but that those written by computer seemed a little more informative and trustworthy.”

Clerwall, an assistant professor in media and communication studies at Karlstad University in Karlstad, Sweden concluded that “perhaps the most interesting result in the study is that there are [almost] no… significant differences in how the two texts are perceived.”

In terms of narrative arcs, Hammond says, “Like any decent hack, the machine is coming to learn that there are only five or six compelling tales available: back from the brink, outrageous fortune, sudden catastrophe and so on.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

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Tag Archives: Sports

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