The Global Backyard

mrG — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 20:55:08 -0400

A slow sort of day of just tending to what's there with one kid home from school with a flu, the other on his alternate day off and Mama out at work at the clinic and me just tending to what's there and doing a bit of nip and tuck hack and tweak as opportunities arise.

A small thing looking at it but a big thing when it gets done was hunting down the last of the showstopper bugs in my tests to upgrade www.teledyn.com to the new drupal, and that's going to turn some heads when the 4.3 comes out. I won't post any spoilers, just be prepared: Drupal is the best of all possible worlds in free-software CMS, and with 4.3, it's poised to take the world by storm, or at least make some serious waves.

I also installed a renegade DNS to paint over brokeness in the SportsNetwork feed in yet another hack plastered on our code to overcome what they can't seem to fix in their code, but hey, the ICT world ain't perfect, no matter what it pretends, and there isn't even much will to make it so, so the rest of us just plod on, plastering patches.

The world right here

It being a third Thursday, though, it's Lions night and tonight we awarded a Citizen of the Year to local sawbones Dr van Dorp, and it was his speech that made the day completely rare. The good Dr accepted our award, and then took us on a whirlwind tour of biographical vignettes gleened from the patients he's seen in these past 16 years since his world-travelling return to Wiarton.

And it was an amazing trip, told with passion and care, and it shone a light over our sleepy vacation haven that will be hard to forget.

Some random examples: One of his patients was a direct descendent of Sir Walter Raliegh, him of tobacco fame and later infamy of piracy charges for which he was eventually ordered executed by King James I, the direct ancestor of another van Dorp patient. He showed us two exceedingly rare books bequeathed to him by another; they are the detailed biographical records of every person to serve in the Dutch Resistance during WWII, as did this benefactor, and also the author of of one of the chapters in that never translated book, also a van Dorp patient. There were not one but two of the ill-fated Bernardo Boys -- whom he called the "orphans of the industrial revolution" boys abandoned by families wrecked by labour conditions of 1871 England, parcelled off like cargo to often vile and abusive settlers in need of cheap slave labour in the Canadian wilderness (although we didn't exactly call it that, we still don't) -- there were survivors of the post-WWII prison camps for "disarmed foreign combatants" as Eisenhower called them, so called so they'd be beneath the protection of the Geneva Convention and thus could be (ahem) legally left for years to subsist on rainwater, grass and snails -- more German soldiers died in those post-war prison camps than in all other campaigns of that war combined ...

"But your history books won't tell you that," says the Dr, "You learn that right here, in the stories you hear right in your own backyard."

That and more. Like ex German soldiers who fought Stalin along side Mongolian regiments and had the photo album to prove it, the the tatooed prisoner who had, weak from dissentry, been paraded past Dr. Joseph Mengles and lived to party with the two Americans who had helped him walk it, like a woman who, as a small child, had her head ruffled by Hitler as the dictator passed through a crowd in Austria, another who recalled the handbell airship criers of London during the air-raids of WWI ...

I had to dig to find just passing evidence of this stuff on Google, yet there it is, the world history of the twentieth century, tucked in the very stories of the faces that we see on our village streets, way up here, miles from anywhere.

Van Dorp is right. The world is right here, here in our own backyard.

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The Global Backyard

The world right here