Food colonialism, says George Monbiot, is alive and kicking.

Thanks to mismanagement and over-consumption, Europe has dispatched many of its fisheries. The easy, now twenty-year-old solution, was to develop agreements with poorer nations who would be happy to trade their fish for currency.

Senegal’s location on the west coast of Africa made it an ideal European commercial fishing destination. So ideal, that its fish stocks are depleting, its indigenous fish boats have fallen by 48% since 1997, and the price of fish, an important source of of protein in the local diet, has risen to the point where many Senegalese cannot afford three meals a day.

European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, wants to broker a new deal with Senegal, which, since 2006, has refused to sign a new deal or to renew its prior fishing agreement with EU.

But Europe is still getting its Senegalese fish. European boats register themselves as Senegalese, then buy up local quotas or transfer catches far offshore.

Rice and cotton from Pakistan’s Indus Valley are cheap because the production costs of water and soil deterioration are not accounted for in their selling prices.

Saudi Arabia and other petro-powers, short on their own arable land, have come up with a new approach to securing their food supplies. They are planning to buy and farm hundreds of thousands of hectares of productive land in other countries, not for trade, but for shipment straight back home.

Ethiopia and Sudan are both keen to participate in the Saudi’s mega-farm scheme. Both countries have desperate needs for food aid, but it is questionable whether any of the cash gained would be used to feed their people.

Since upgrading from WP 2.1 to 2.6.1, my style sheet has been a bit recalcitrant. Classes and attributes are morphing in surprising ways, and my fixes aren’t fixing them the way I would like.

The easiest solution would be to ignore it, since content is supposedly king. But a king without pretty clothes is one of the many puzzles that keeps me up nights.

I really liked my stylesheet, which was based on Thought Mechanics’ Benevolence theme. It was simple, elegant, and easy to adjust before the upgrade. Unfortunately, according to Wordpress, Benevolence is no longer supported. My experience trying to make some basic changes to this site’s look bears that out.

There may not be an easy fix, short of finding a new theme that I like as much as I liked Benevolence. If you are a regular visitor to Vancouveriste, you may find over the next while, that it looks different every time you arrive.

The final countdown has begun. Barring unforeseen circumstances, September 10 will be theoretical physics’ big coming out party.

That is the day the $9-billion CERN Large Hadron Collider will start colliding protons in a very cold (minus 270ºC) 2- kilometer long tunnel 100 meters beneath the French-Swiss border. It’s all a little heady for someone like me, a non-scientist who barely made it through first year biology way back in the the last century.

The major objective of the LHC is to find the Higgs boson, aka The God Particle. Conventional cosmology holds that the Higgs boson will explain why gravity did not stop the Universe from expanding after the Big Bang popped, and how a mysterious singularity transformed from nothing into a universe that keeps expanding.

The Big Bang, of course, is the best theory we have to explain the origins of the Universe. By sheer coincidence, present day cosmologists developed the Big Bang Theory in a “special time” before the Universe speeds up too much.

In about 100 billion years, there will have been so much expansion that, no matter how refined the technology of future cosmologists, the observable universe will look pretty much like it did 100 years ago–a huge static island of stars surrounded by a dark,confounding void full of dark matter and dark energy.

Unless, of course, the Big Bang never happened. Suppose the Universe has always been here, and it is contracting as well as expanding, there is no Higgs boson, no dark matter, no dark energy, no strings, nothing but a great, huge, gaping paradigm shift?

No matter. Scientific hubris will endure.

Either way it will be a win-win for the theoretical physicists, what with all the new research grants that will come pouring in, and for the rest of us, who, the physicists seem to believe, are waiting breathlessly for the newer, deeper understanding of our mysterious existence the LHC experiments will impart.

There is, perhaps unfortunately, a catch that may keep us out of scientific satori. The LHC almost probably will produce miniature black holes when the protons collide.

Just how these little black holes will behave is the big question. Conventional cosmologists hold to the view that they will evaporate thanks to Hawking radiation, named after Stephen Hawking who first theorized it.

But Hawking has been wrong before about black holes. Though the probability is vanishingly small, these little black LHC holes just might end up eating our planet.

With around 50 months between the firing of the protons and the end of the Mayan calendar on December 21, 2012, some sensitive souls are quaking in their “end is nigh high” boots.

There’s only one thing I know for sure. If the cosmologists do unleash the force that will destroy our world, I hope they keep it to themselves for as long as possible.

Being slowly sucked into a wormhole seems far less frightening than facing the mayhem that would be unleashed upon the streets of this soon to end, best of all possible worlds.

There are rumours the next Batman movie will begin shooting in Vancouver early in 2009. Director Christopher Nolan apparently wants Cher to play Catwoman as a vamp in her twilight years.

Conrad Black, Lord of Cross Harbour, has a job in the prison library, and puts on regular, well-attended lectures for his poorly educated jail mates. He manages to focus on his self-important work because he’s manipulated his cell mate to act as his butler and all round step-and-fetchit.

Lady Black is not doing as well. She has been knocked off the local socialites’ invite list and spends her days mainly sequestered in the Black’s $35-million Palm Beach mansion, except for a weekly, four-hour round trip to see hubby in jail.

She may even be rinsing out her own smalls now. The Black’s household staff has been reduced from three to one.

Still lording it: Prisoner Conrad Black and the wife who can’t stop feeling sorry for herself… | Mail Online.

Thanks to the help of Phil Rees, the blog software was finally upgraded from WP ver 2.1 to ver 2.6.1 yesterday. The point of the exercise was to teach me how to do this myself, since WP will come up with a new version, and sooner rather than later. The upgrade itself was remarkably smooth, thanks in part to the WP Automatic Upgrade plug-in which we installed after database and site were backed up, but more to Phil’s patient and thorough assistance.

Could I now do this on my own? I’m not even a little geeky, so it’s doubtful, though I suppose with a bit more coaching I could eventually manage it with help from on line tutorials. Likewise plug-in installation. I remember deleting and installing plug-ins, and realize the process is pretty logical, but I can’t remember which steps to follow, or in what order. Again, time, practice, and repetition are all that’s needed.

As for the new WP ver 2.6 interface, there’s a few changes to get used to, and probably a plug-in or two that I still need. There is a utility for upgrading plug-ins in ver 2.6 that worked perfectly for the Automatic Upgrade plug-in, but stalls out on the delicio.us and Google Search Bar plug-ins. These are just details that will get ironed out eventually.

On Phil’s recommendation, I also installed a couple of new utilities, both free. First was the 7-Zip file manager, which worked very well for unzipping the plug-ins. Previously I’ve used TugZip and WinZip, which I find has an awkward interface.

I also installed Chami.com’s HTML-kit which is a fully integrated development and validation utility for HTML, XHTML, XML, Javascript, PHP, Perl, and a lot more stuff I will never go near. Though I don’t do much web design these days, I like the idea of HTML-kit’s integration features. Previously, I would write HTML in a text editor, or occasionally an older version of Dreamweaver, then validate in CSE HTML Validator or on the W3C site, and write CSS in TopStyle.

Phil suggested downloading the Flock browser to improve my interface between blogging on Wordpress and photosharing on Flickr. Flock has a resident blog posting utility which looks more intuitive that the one in WP 2.6.1, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Flock has been billed as the social media browser because of the way it bundles social media sites, RSS, and various accounts like Gmail. Supposedly this is faster than clicking from tab to tab in Firefox. I’ve messed about with Flock a little yesterday and today, but I keep going back to Firefox, even though it slows down and sometimes jams up completely when multiple tabs are open,

I also don’t like that Flock’s default search engine is Yahoo. Plus I’m not a social media butterfly, and don’t see the advantage of having my Facebook friend images and updates appear in on my web browser. Or the (scarce) comments on my Flickr photostream, either, for that matter. I also found the Flock RSS feed for my subscriptions to be a few posts behind real time, though they were up-to-date when I clicked on the links in my Favourites. Every browser has its advantages, and if you are interested in Flock, check out a video review here.

Phil also introduced me to Vyew.com, which we plan to use for ongoing support needs. Vyew is a real time file sharing, collaboration, and conferencing site that enables subscribers to post content and share screenshots for review and collaboration. The free version is supported by ads that are supposed to be fairly unobtrusive. I haven’t tried Vyew yet, but like its potential.

Now that WP 2.6.1. is installed, I can rebuild my blog roll page, which was attacked by blog roll spammers a few weeks ago. I’m also messing about with an Adsense plug-in, Amazon, and Cafe Press, all of which add in to a mind-mucking and (for me) steep learning curve. My head is still aching, my to do list is long, and I feel sort of stodgy and out-of-date.

The news isn’t good for the oceans, or for us. On top of anaerobic dead spots, a soup of plastic bags entering the food chain, and a kill off of predatory fish, it looks like jellyfish and bacteria are dominating most of our oceans.