3 ms·

Thanks neonate for archive link. Here is the best quote from the article: "Collect the county’s gophers in order to ship them to Australia, where they would be

by pomian 5y ago

Thanks neonate for archive link. Here is the best quote from the article: "Collect the county’s gophers in order to ship them to Australia, where they would be inoculated with a disease fatal to rabbits but harmless to the gophers..." The whole project reminds me of the Canadian TV commercials - funded by the government, "hinterland who's who". Growing up in Canada, watching these on TV, we never could figure out if they were serious or comedy. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upR_s5rigVQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upR_s5rigVQ

jollybean 5y ago
Those hinterland-who's were mesmerizing, there's something very trippy about them. I think they were partly the inspiration for Boards of Canada.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Thanks for sharing, I had seen a parody of those Hinterland videos a long time ago and now I feel like I have a much more thorough appreciation (https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I)
motohagiography 5y ago
These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding. The logrider's waltz is another one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8, but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea) All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from a place where the future was beige, and unlimited cigarettes, courduroy, moustaches, LSD, and money for new technologies like portable recorders, theremins and synthesizers made it basically like a Trotskyist version of Mad Men meets early Star Trek. Canada is really, really weird. That's a show I'd watch anyway.
- cgh 5y ago
  This fantastic comment accurately captures the feel of the CBC in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was a small child. We had one channel growing up in the north, logically called CBC North, and I always wondered if anyone actually picked up the phone to contact the Canadian Wildlife Service to talk about beavers.

by pomian 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

Those hinterland-who's were mesmerizing, there's something very trippy about them. I think they were partly the inspiration for Boards of Canada.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

Thanks for sharing, I had seen a parody of those Hinterland videos a long time ago and now I feel like I have a much more thorough appreciation (https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I)

motohagiography 5y ago

These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding. The logrider's waltz is another one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8, but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea) All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from a place where the future was beige, and unlimited cigarettes, courduroy, moustaches, LSD, and money for new technologies like portable recorders, theremins and synthesizers made it basically like a Trotskyist version of Mad Men meets early Star Trek. Canada is really, really weird. That's a show I'd watch anyway.

cgh 5y ago
This fantastic comment accurately captures the feel of the CBC in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was a small child. We had one channel growing up in the north, logically called CBC North, and I always wondered if anyone actually picked up the phone to contact the Canadian Wildlife Service to talk about beavers.