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LAUTENS: Library patrons beware the password police

The plague of passworditis has spread to the very left ventricle of the heart of Western civilization – West Vancouver Memorial Library.
Lautens

The plague of passworditis has spread to the very left ventricle of the heart of Western civilization – West Vancouver Memorial Library.

WVML’s requirement for a password to use its lobby terminals merely to access the collection index is a new intrusion to torture a restive, sullen, password-plagued populace. What’s next? A password for using diaper-changing tables in public washrooms, perhaps?

So a password is obligatory to discover if, say, Canadian actor Christopher Plummer’s riveting memoir In Spite of Myself is in the WVML collection, and available.

It isn’t. I have it. A cast-off, bought for a pricey $2 – most WVML hardcovers cost $1. Not borrowed enough to earn shelf space?

Like other patrons, I’ve similarly acquired books by or about everyone from Frank Sinatra and Dorothy Parker to Will Durant and Janet Flanner. Books with total costs of hundreds of dollars new are mine for the price of a loud lunch.

As for the computerized checking out of books, the other day I thought I had, but I hadn’t. At the exit barrier red lights flashed, a siren wailed, SWAT squads dashed from behind stacks, I was thrown face-down on the floor, handcuffed, frisked, and checked with Interpol for support for foreign or domestic terrorism. The jail cell was less drafty than I expected. …

Very well, I exaggerate. No exaggeration about the ceaseless “modernization” loved by geeks, Google and your grandchildren: One financial institution recently darkened many lives complexifying its formerly crystal-clear monthly statement. Another bewilderized its technology from top to bottom, causing months of confusion – for honest patrons. Thieves in Russia probably cracked the system in half an hour.

And when Telus imposed a change in its cellphone system, its customers suffering from the improvement ironically couldn’t make the change online. They had to wait in old-fashioned, pencil-and-paper lineups. My savvy wife got us through the actual process in 15 minutes. Two dense males took more than an hour and were still yakking when we left.

• • •

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the misanthrope with small respect for humanity can be the most ardent lover of animals.

The second-most pornographic photo I’ve ever seen in what used to be called a family newspaper showed row after neat row of elephant tusks bound for market. (The most pornographic was of a dead elephant and its child. They lay near a pool laced with cyanide by poachers. Vomit-making.)

The illegal ivory trade is dominated by Japan and China, but Denmark apparently is an eager customer. In the far north it includes harvesting narwhal tusks. Human self-interest, especially with dollar signs attached (when aren’t they?), will always, always trump nature’s when they conflict. So we’re trashing land and water and pushing back our non-human family.

Sympathy for cougars may not be thick on the ground. Such animals capable of killing us in a fair fight, so to speak, reach deeply into our primitive fear zone. It doesn’t matter that statistically far more people die from bee stings.

At least one of the cougars killed recently in these parts was found to be emaciated. Hungry. Desperate for food. The same is true of bears – those who become “habituated” to human settlements, scratching for a meal, are on death row.

So a standing ovation for businessman Michael Audain, owner of Polygon Homes, whose foundation writes big cheques for good causes, including North Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery and the Audain Art Museum which opened a year ago in Whistler. In 2014 Audain had one of nature’s epiphanies: While he and friends were sitting out a rainfall in the forest near Bella Bella a grizzly bear and her three clubs nosed by, accepting the alien human presence, just a few arm’s lengths away.

You’d think the experience might lead to an argument over whose turn it was to do the laundry. Instead, Audain pitched in $500,000 to create the Grizzly Bear Foundation, bringing on board Chief Douglas Neasloss of the Kitasoo/Xai’xais First Nation and Grouse Mountain Resorts president Stuart McLaughlin, among others.

As for bear slayings in our own area – by “conservation” officers – let’s not get started.

• • •

Animal lovers, canine division: You’ve never read a dog book like Vancouver writer John Armstrong’s A Series of Dogs. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry – really cry, the big salty stuff.

• • •

Painful restaurant loss: The Marinaside, under the Ironworkers’ Bridge in North Vancouver – splendid food, value, atmosphere – has closed. Like Stanley seeking Livingstone to find, but then never forgotten.

Former Vancouver Sun columnist Trevor Lautens writes every second Friday on politics and life with a West Vancouver bias. rtlautens@gmail.com

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