lotusland - nervous politics from a laid-back city

translink lols

has anyone ever witnessed this? apparently, two people shagged on the 351. do not lick translink furniture.

this is more interesting than anything going on in politics right now. 

ian mulgrew says our pro-lizard stance is making us lose face

The criticism that a toad, a lizard, perhaps even a cricket or a millipede may die during the show's run makes a mockery of Vancouver's world-class pretensions.

It makes us look like a city of philistines.

yeah, the crux of the article is 'if you dont think a model panopticon full of ugly little creatures is the height of culture, youre a backwater hick.'  fair enough, bro - nobody said my neck wasn't red.

i thought dada was meant to be unsettling.  if you're an unfeeling knob, you might be disturbed in that "bentham's prison full of animals, oh, the irony is so grossly inappropriate!" sense.   mulgrew fancies this is really what is grinding animal rights activists' gears.   as compelling as the bentham-on-my-mind theory is, reactions are likely more visceral than that due to the fact prisons and creepy-crawlies are involved.   if mulgrew is writing this sanctimonious cage-liner in order to stir us into a dadaist frenzy, this is actually brilliant journalism.  somehow, i think he's approaching it from the "only a hick would care about spider rights" place. 

i'm not giving him much credit, because he does a few things in the article that make him seem like a philistine or poseur.  firstly, he claims artist huang yong ping's work is brilliant because it "resonates with insight into the current clash of civilizations, faiths and ideologies."  anyone who uses the phrase 'clash of civilizations' is, at best, intellectually lazy and definitely too much of a philistine to go around calling others out on their lack of ze culture.  secondly, he refers to foucault as a 'legal theorist' when anyone worth their weight in avant-garde intellectual street cred knows that we refer to these french people simply as 'theorists' (or social theorists, if you must) because disciplinary boundaries are just that fucking passé.  ok, so this evaluation of him isnt exactly serious.  i guess what i am hinting at is that vancouver is a hick city, and that by equally pretentious standards, ian mulgrew is also a hick who writes missives for the village news. 

next time, avoid the 'it's good because i can bring up foucault in conjunction with it' and stick to something more moralizing and pedantic... like, say, the fact kierkegaard would agree with you, and want the vancouverites to make the jump from the moral to the aesthetic.   

"This brouhaha over creepy-crawlies is bush league," he maintains, going on to discredit the normative claims of the protest as "the equivalent of condemning fishing because anglers use worms."  well, dude, i have news for you - some vegan animal rights hippies would protest that.  and because we dont live in the communist china you so touchingly invoke at the conclusion of the article, we let them go around and do so.

if the humane society tells people not to see the exhibit, then it just gets more press.   if people are revolted, it recalls the halcyon days of dada. 

yeah, vancouver does need awesome art exhibits, but it doesnt need hacks from the village news reminding us that we are hicks if we take issue with them.  and fuck this 'world-class city' shit - didn't toronto copyright that phrase to help them feel better about themselves?

2007 - so far, so wtf

so i go to cuba for a damn week and i miss the great bc place deflation.  whatever, fine.   do all the fun stuff when im not around, vancouver.  i dont know if people are aware this was an international story.  i found out about it watching french tv - tv5, to be exact.  they reported it as an embarassment for an olympic city.  go whine to london, france.

my new years resolutions are

1. update this blog more often, with lies.
2. do more on the radio - i like media that involves a bunker.  i should show the radio some more love. 
3.  learn how to drive.   i do not know how to drive a car. 
4.  get the hell out of this weak ass bitch of a city. 
5.  organize a ridiculously large party.
6. drink frequently at the biltmore and at koerners.
7. regularly do some kind of workout that doesnt involve a gym and perhaps involves the outdoors or other people.  seems healthier, and everyone at my gym is a douche, anyway.

thats ambitious enough, methinks.

dont drink the water

so i was watching coachs corner.  not only was don cherry wearing a gold lamé jacket, but he was making quips about vancouvers water situation.

everyone back east:  you are unduly obsessed.

1. yeah, it was brown for a few days... but as bza said, just pretend its iced tea
2. yeah, people punched others out in costco for bottled water.  this merited a lol.
3. NOBODY in vancouver drinks tap water, ok.  the only serious threat was that of no coffee.   shit, tap water?  seriously, do you also think we ride the peasant wagon?

the real problem in vancouver is the snow menace.  and by vancouver, i mean a small radius around sfu.  and by snow menace, i mean A GOOD THREATENING 5 CM.  it looks like a christmas movie out there, and folks, its mayhem!  families in the neighbourhood were locked in for hours waiting for the member of the household with the suburban assault vehicle to return and deliver them to starbucks.

in which ainge is vaguely apologetic

to the 20-70 people who bother coming here to see a whole lot of old posts, i apologize.  i know the blogosphere is running laps around this pithy url at a neck-snapping pace and that this blogorevolution of the netroots and pyjamacrati is a by-the-second type deal.  (yes, i hate that jargon too).

quite frankly, i have nothing to say right now.  my opinion on the middle east isnt original or needed.  vic toews and his plan to imprison children (and the fact that crazy mofo is our justice minister) aside, the tories have begun to bore me.  the green race is pretty much a done deal, which means its pretty much boring besides the bickering surrounding council seats and constitutions.  i couldnt give one tenth of an iota of an unidentified flying fuck about liberal leadership fundraising, mostly since rae and ignatieff are the front runners.

W says "brb, condos"

apparently this is only temporary as the landmark will be tacked to the stupid condos being erected.  for those who dont know, the woodwards building is being converted into a nyu-wannabe yuppie condo and embedded art school thingy.

metro vancouver shitty and poorly edited as usual

so if you read todays metro, youll notice that all the world cup game times are written in eastern standard time.  vancouver edition, my arse.  fuck you, metro.  the italy-ghana game is at noon.

a much more useful tool is found on fifa's site, which enables you to see the game time for pretty much every time zone on god's green earth.

italy vs ghana:  12 pm pacific motherfucking standard time.  be on commercial drive or be square.

lol n00b

today i start my new job.  isnt that exciting, looking down at the world from the peak of mount noob.

(ps my kingdom of loathing characters name is heidi hole, for lack of inspiration)

city of vancouver contemplates whoredom

i fucking hate whoever came up with this idea. 

How would you feel about dropping off your taxes at Starbucks City Hall or catching the symphony at the iPod Performing Arts Centre?

The City of Vancouver is looking at selling the rights to name its city-owned facilities to corporate and individual sponsors.

and in response to this...

Universities have the Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of B.C. "Is that OK for public facilities?" said Medland yesterday. "If it's not OK, why not?"

it's ok because that is a private donation from a public rich dude who likes their name attached to things, rather than an ad for a company.  if it was called the wosk's furniture centre for dialogue, that would be an ad.

main street video is hella stupid

seriously, who made this?

-50 points for repeatedly saying "uh, main street has a lot of old neighbourhoods" without supplying any actual historical notes beyond the bit about heritage hall and not really discussing any neighbourhood besides south main in mount pleasant.  jackasses. 

-20 points for scene hair and -30 points for scene hair trying to be witty. 

-50 points for excessive shots of cool activities, such as snowboarding, mopeding, skateboarding, and being a self-absorbed university student.

the mount pleasant segment of main is cool because it has amenities, ok.  it has late nite bingo, karaoke at the veterans club, good restaurants, 24 hr coffee shops, and not a lot of old people telling you to shut up.  i could make a better video than this. 

very important blogger business

can the entire blogosphere please tell adam yoshida, the most right-wing man in canada, that he has to come out and party with ainge and friends on wednesday, breaking all other plans if necessary?  i dont care if the vrwc is having a secret meeting in an abbotsford bunker. 

no, im not going to tell you stalkers where we are congregating.

the devil with prudence!

this is a personal post on a politicized issue.  i hate the bc transit cops.  all theyve brought to my life are guns and roughing people up on the skytrain and a $173 fine because i forgot my u-pass in another purse.   the guy in front of me got a fare deferral.  wtf, etc.  the fines were like $45 in the halcyon days of fare checking being conducted by transit employees in blue gore tex.

anyway, they havent really made me feel all that safer.

i was riding a downtown bus when a hoodied twentysomething white male with schizo-black eye sockets carrying a can of what was either bear mace, regular mace, or pepper spray.  he passes out all "ahh, bed" style on the bench across from me.  after a 30 second sleep in which the mace can he was cradling happened to roll out of his arms onto the floor, he asked if anyone had a cellphone he could use.

id been thinking about nixon and the madman theory that day, so i gave in to his demand. barring a decision to mace my friends and i, the worst thing that could happen would be that he ran off the bus with my phone.  losing a phone is no big deal - i could always latch onto the juicy teat of an "extend your contract and get another cheap-to-free  phone" scam. 

he dialed and kind of grunt-spoke to two people.  i asked for the phone back, perhaps too firmly.  he returned it, and asked to call a third number.  i drew the line.  i am not a phone booth, i insisted.  bza then gave him a quarter, which was received somewhat halfheartedly.

i think i freaked my friends out by letting the guy use the phone.  am i some kind of weirdo?

hey, bitch... come try that when im in the front yard

full disclosure:  i really hate paul martin and my local liberal candidate.  i hate the former less than the latter. 

some little douchebag jacked my dad's christmas lights about four hours after he bought them.  he got the red ones and hung them from his massive (4' x 4') liberal party yard sign.  yes, theyre the expensive ones, those "freakin $10 for a puny strand of" led lights.

my dad is really choked about all this.  see, my dad thinks the liberals and christmas are the coolest things ever, and was very excited about this elexmas merger.  i think this is the first year he has actually noticed how many christmas decorations actually come in red.

anyway, little douchebag, next time maybe try actually defacing the sign.  you can cut it with knives, spraypaint, kick it down, stick things onto it, write all over it... etc.  defacing the sign actually fucks the liberal party over, even if in a tiny way.  jacking my dads lights just means that he is going to go to canadian tire, buy more of that shit, and put barbed wire all along the edges so you dont steal them again.  it doesnt do shit to the liberals.  if anything, hes going to put in like eight billion more hours into campaigning, just to stick it to the hooligans.  that pisses me off, because i dont like the liberals.

lotuslav rules, man.

in case you were wondering why i waste my time with some math geek who was against john kerry before he was for him and  likes fukuyama and takes the view that restricting immigration is some kind of solution for terrorism, i will paste part of his email to me:

i was talking to a former TA and he told me that he went to pyongyang last week for the arirang games. the entire trip cost him $1600. it seems like obtaining tickets for these events is not too difficult, north korean interpreters and state minders speak good english so one does not need to learn korean. perhaps we should go together. if we can keep out of trouble, it might be fun.

dudes who take their girlfriends to north korea are so hot.

crashing events!

im crashing an event tonight with a merry crew led by none other than philly c (reppin da ubc projects).  does anyone have any tips for memorably crashing box socials?  im sure all you hacks, politicos, grad students, and rockstars have all done this sort of thing in the name of asskissing, free food, or shitdisturbing.

the last thing i crashed was a conservative pub night, which resulted in stealing an ernie eves poster and hanging it in dipper steves room.  that was good!  i dont know if i can top it.

dear vancouverites, learn to be better filmgoers

so, my reason for not updating this thing or commenting on your lovely blogs is the vancouver international film festival. nothing personal, eh?

three types of people go to the film festival
1. old people
2. neatly-dressed people speaking languages i dont know
3. emo dweebs
(and of course, ainge, who is young, sloppily-dressed, and non-emo)

overall, vancouverites need to get a fucking life.  im tired of seeing your dumb asses lining up for hours to see that boring, played-out documentary about red states vs blue states.  yes, i realise your steady diet of crappy global news supplemented with the cnn blaring at the gym has programmed your brain to destroy any remnants of art appreciation and replace the gaping holes with a burning desire to watch americans dance their political gavotte so you can sit there and smirk all haughtily and feel better about your level of political knowledge.  oooh, look at me, im interested in all these timely and relevant things, unlike dumb americans.

no, i am not going to write the film festival and tell them to deny you your crack.  but please... if you end up attending a film that happens to involve a tad more creativity and thought, and it is lost on your shitty excuse for a free will/brain, leave the theatre silently.  save your (loud) genius opinions for your friends and your blogs.  if i run into this again, i am going to start punching the guilty parties.  punching.

i just watched 4, a russian film directed by ilya khrzhanovsky.  starting with a scene where three people lie about their jobs in a bar, and ending with a funeral in a village, it's his take on contemporary russia.  you dumbass, pseudo-cultured vancouverites lined up en masse to see roberto rosselini's roma: citta' aperta (preceded by a fairly lame but heartfelt and whimsical introduction by the great italian directors daughter).  you know, all the texbooks say he's the father of neorealism (not the kenneth waltz kind), so he must be important.  seeing his film makes you soooo cool, doesnt it. 

god forbid you actually sit through another great example of neorealism not yet mentioned in your stupid coffee table books on art house movies.  no, you have to ruin it with your goddamn bitching.  you have to sit there, behind me, and loudly proclaim 4 was "a train wreck" that "totally sucked after the bar scene, which was really interesting"

it's not like this was some kind of inaccessible, avant-garde, "fuck you, democratization of film" kind of movie.  it was gritty, genuinely funny, wholly disturbing, and completely engrossing.  it was human.   its shifts from the manic to the languid made it alive.

im sorry that you dorks spend all day watching cnn and reality tv and cant deal with a bit of mud, extended scenes without hotties, and drunk slavs.  im sorry that you can only be 'entertained' by plastic, dead, and packaged soundbites with accompanying sterile, pleasing visuals.

this isn't the first film which has elicited such a depressing reaction from the crowd.  you dorks bitch every time some uppity director has the gall to make a film that doesnt 1. make americans look like assholes 2. provide  sterile, mind-numbing escapism 3. glorify some existence antithetical to the yuppie way of life without all the scary details.

get a life.  get away from my film festival at once, but leave your money.

sasha is a bitch

sasha: how come your stupid blog hasnt been updated in like forever
sasha: i've been loading it three times a day every day
me: well get a life, sasha
sasha: and it still says shit about the vancouver civil election
me: waaaah
sasha: do i care about the vancouver civil election
sasha: no
sasha: why not?
sasha: because i am sasha
sasha: and i have greater concerns on my mind
sasha: for example, sex and math
me: go date someone who updates their blog, bitch
me: ill go downstairs and find a broomstick
sasha: why
me: to take your place
sasha: better be a pretty long broomstick
me: sasha im going to post this conversation on my blog
me: with the title "russian man claims he can outperform broomstick and other reasons kim campbell probably didnt spend too much time campaigning"
sasha: well at least then it will be updated!

and thus begins me updating my neglected blog with a few posts with the common theme of "shit sasha doesnt care about"

ainge's best of ubc, edition 1, yo

best place to eat on ubc campus:  aji taro sushi, located upstairs in the village (which is on 10th avenue, or something).  it is so aesthetically and gastronomically pleasing, im kind of sad that the non-ubc set will likely never experience a meal there.  too many vancouverites are eating their sushi out of scratched up bento boxes and disposable containers.  aji taro offers the most gorgeous presentation.  you will want to steal all the dishes there, man.  one of my ways to rate sushi places against eachother is the quality of the spicy tuna maki.  some places just dump spicy sauce on a tuna roll, but other places actually blend the spice in with the tuna, and roll it with a bit of cucumber.  aji taro makes a damn good spicy tuna roll.  moreover, it's damned affordable, as my pig self has never walked out of there dropping more than $15.   the only drawback, and this only applies to the extremely stoned or the pediophobic, is that there are like eight dolls posed around the restaurant.  i didnt find it creepy, but andrew did.

best place to go during long breaks between classes:  a beach, stupid.  why waste your time running into people in the sub, and regretting it because you just wasted 20 mins of your life on mutually unsatisfying small talk?

best take-out food in the sub:  pit burger bar - veggie burgers, belgian fries, all kinds of beef/chicken burgers.  the pit gets points for using cardboard food containers, while the other, more hippie-oriented sub outlets put everything in fucking styrofoam and offer a 10-cent discount for students who lug tupperware and thermoses around so they can use their own containers.  i reckon the best effing offering at the pit is the veggie burger.  i have dramatically carnivorous friends who find them delicious.  i think ive seen natalie order them a few times, and her goal in life is to eat as many kinds of dead animal as possible.

best sub dining experience + best ubc breakfast:  pendulum restaurant.  for ~$4, you can get a bowl of salad (not the leaf kind, but like noodle, pasta, greek, couscous) or a slice of lasagna (they have multiple kinds) from their display case.  in the hot food department, they have a daily pasta, quesadilla (highly recommended), soup, and sandwich.   they have a lovely patio, as well as couches and tables indoors.  the only time i went to class drunk was after a few glasses of wine at pendulum. 

in the breakfast department, nothing can beat their eggs florentine + hashbrowns.

best ubc pub:  forget the pit, and fuck the gallery unless youre looking for 75-cent cups of coffee. koerners pub and it's huge, partially-heated patio for life.  the food is a bit overpriced and disappointing unless theyve got the grill on.  they actually make bangers, yknow?  you shouldnt care about food, anyway, since youre going there to drink.  on the patio, you can kind of hear marine drive, but you cant see it thanks to the thick, gorgeous trees.  pitcher prices are slightly lower than most gross westside bars, and koerners has 90% less douchebags in baseball caps.

na na na na, na na na na, HEEEEYYYYYY GOODBYE!

as nelson muntz would say, ha ha.  go back to port moody where you belong.  sorry, port moody.

my brother just read this fetus of a post and said, "is this about christy clark?  what are you going to type next?  you are the weakest link, goodbye!"

yeah, i cant offer up much else besides corny platitudes.  so basically, im kind of a loser tonight.  yes, according to a 14-year-old guy sitting in a chair in gold shorts, swinging a tiki torch, and singing james brown, *i* am the loser.  no, im not making this up for effect.  that is actually what he is doing right now.   wait until i tell him i embarassed him on the internets!

georgia straight best of vancouver

my cell keeps ringing.  people should stop calling me for like 15 minutes.  i need to post, man.

so, the georgia straight has their 'best of vancouver' out right now.  the globe's "gary mason's vancouver" ad campaign was listed as the best reason to move to burnaby.  i dont know what torontonians think of vancouverites, but im guessing we seem like total jocks to you people.  either that, or you people really hate vancouver.  we get that jolly moron sports reporter rick cluff doing the cbc radio morning show, and now we get sexist tard extraordinaire gary mason doing our globe column.  ew.

i hate gary mason.  i posted this in a comment at cato.  sometime during my teenage years, he wrote a sports column (and the sports page IS where he belongs) on katarina witt that made a bigger deal out of her playboy shoot than her olympic achievements.  last i checked, nice boobies are all over vancouver, and olympic medallists are not.  i stopped reading the sports page after that cos i started to see its basically marketed towards guys.  dumb guys.  ew.

despite this flash of brilliance on their part, the georgia straight best of vancouver remains totally stupid and uninspired.  the best neighbourhood is apparently a stretch of west 10th avenue ending at blanca. its a geriatric yuppie kingdom with "cute little stores" where you can buy expensive pepper mills... booooring.  the best womens fashion store is aritzia, an offensive concept seeing as the only people in burnaby who wear aritzia are teenagers who cant pick out their own clothes without seeing what other people are wearing.  skanktacular.  aritzia used to play drum & bass all the time, but now they play the postal service and franz ferdinand.  puke city, my friends, puke city.

if i had my best of vancouver...

ill save that for another post.  my bag is still vibrating and i think the other people in the library want to beat me up due to the offensive whirring noises emanating from my person.

do communists dream of electric stacks of bills?

making a whopping $800/month, ainge is not stretching ye olde paycheque far enough for anyones liking.  being italian (and thus living at home), she spends a lot of her money on clothes for work, which is ridiculous.  she also spends a lot of money on school-related sundries such as professor x's book, which is the required text for professor x's class (especially annoying when prof x has mega seniority but is unknown outside ubc)  since she is going to be in university until she is in depends, it is unlikely she will ever afford anything exciting.  ive been taking dumps on the free market, liberalism, and a lot of these other theories the ancient greeks would call "useful lies" to keep the kids in line with the system ... so heres a list of things id buy if i was ballin like crazy.  just so we can appreciate capitalism for once on this damn blog.  go capitalism, youve funded the r&d for such superfluous, yet irrestistible gadgets such as these:

(oh, and im so not a communist.  im a social libertarian.  do you think communists get to date moldovans?  no, they dont.  come on)

1. i would like to be able to afford my cell phone minutes.  im never at home and i dont have a car, so that beeping and vibrating little moneysucker in my purse is actually quite useful.  im so getting a brain tumour next week.  (its not a tumah!)

2. i would like to be able to afford a new phone without extending my contract.  i break my phones all the time due to overuse and neglect.  also, i am a geek and thus start wetting my pants every time i see a phone with hot features.  a half decent megapixel camera, or individual letter keys for text messaging would be nice.  i love the cellphones.  love them.  best. invention. ever.  why do you think i am dating a guy who works in electrical engineering?  its because i am eternally grateful to all those kids who came up with all this networking and signals stuff. 

3. mp3 player.  luckily, someone just bought one for me.  obviously, it wasnt my parents, since they still dont know what mp3s are.

4. a house in the queen charlottes.  sans cell phone.  ok, fine, thats a lie.   avec cell phone, but only so i dont start experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

5.  really sexy, nerdy, responsive and interactive furniture.  like that table that records and displays the history/frequency of things being placed on it by changing colour in high-traffic areas.  these walls, which respond to voice to make patterns.  this plant.  and maybe a nice light-up floor.  mmmm, nerd house.

crack pot

White House drug czar John Walters once blamed the high potency of "B.C. Bud" in part for a rise in marijuana-related emergency room incidents. "Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana," Walters said.

whats a marijuana-related emergency room incident?  getting your hand stuck in the cookie jar?  oooh, i feel a rimshot coming on.  in all my years as a badass vancouver teenager, ive never known anyone go to the emergency room due to weed.  ive seen people lose their vision for a bit due to weed/alcohol mixing, and ive seen alcohol poisoning... meh, maybe we are just used to the crack pot out here.  im not saying weed is safe (hello, lung cancer) but ive experienced more harassment, brutality, and vomit-wiping from drunks than from stoners.

i hope they open the newly-busted border tunnel to visitors one day, because it sounds dope.  at the very least, the trailer park boys should be allowed to film an epic miniseries there.

burnaby trendsetting

the cool things to do in burnaby:

1. have hot dog parties and make the official burnaby mountain hot dog, which has dijon, ajvar, sauerkraut, jerk bbq sauce, and chipotle bbq sauce.  for some reason, my house doesnt have ketchup.

2. paint everything with poster paint, especially shirts and washable surfaces.  play nice and allow your ndp friends to paint amendments all over your stuff.

3.  midnight tricycle derby!  the only person with enough cojones to graduate from the little hill in my backyard to the three consecutive hills (my front yard, the driveway, and the road) was regular commenter bza, who looked pimp coasting down the road on a green power rangers trike wearing a gold football helmet.

for the record,

burquitlam is a word, blocservative isn't.  i dont live in burquitlam, but this is what the riding is called.

gucci socialist definition

 youve seen them and envied their stylish, yet socially conscious groove in the european parliaments! now YOU TOO can become a bona fide, red as the soles of your christian louboutin heels gucci socialist!

-sip fair trade espressos and cappuccinos out of a sleek stainless steel travel mug bearing the logo of your dearest cause. upon recognizing the insignia of a beloved cause, other pinkos are apt to initiate conversation with you. this presents a most convenient opportunity to casually mention the summers you spent slaving away in somalia/east van working for said organization. see, your hairstyle may be a $300 coif from suki's, but you are definitely cool enough to bond with the dredheads. -show carefree irreverance by sticking leftist political pins into your marc by marc jacobs coat.  -have a cell phone.  use it to take pictures of you and the comrades downing tanq 10 martinis at the post-demonstration party. -black armani basics and ethnic jewelry: your saving grace for all those times the dress code is annoyingly declared as "dressy casual" ... jewelry which pertains to your actual/successfully feigned ethnicity is a definite plus -hang a rainbow keychain from your louis vuitton purse or wallet. let them think youre queer - if someone assumes youre gay cos of the rainbow, condescendingly laugh it off. they will feel like the pedestrian they are while you continue oozing cool by being such a friend of homos that you dont mind being mistaken for one. -who said greenpeace stickers and bmw's with fat, thirsty engines dont mix?  -art on your walls should be a comprehensive mix of socialist/communist revolution posters, american cold war propaganda, landscapes you photographed gallavanting about the least developed world, and local artists. you should also display certain classical pieces to which you have a deep emotional attatchment. always explain the attachment to guests. -quote habermas, gadamer, and gramsci ad nauseum.  theyre just hot right now. -quote eminem, and oprah - theyre hot too, and so are you if you can pull off quoting a homophobe and the queen bee of pedestrianity. if shit is given unto you, point out that you respect him as an artist, but eminems views are not your own (quote voltaire if necessary); or that oprah singlehandedly crippled the american beef industry (whats your movement done lately?). being acquainted with mass media icons is the hight of rebelliousness cos its rebelling against the rules of rebellion. my word! -somehow justify to yourself that prosciutto and peking duck fit seamlessly into your vegetarian diet -mp3 player playlist: we play both kinds of music, world music and madonna.

ainge's birthday

i have not posted in a while because ive been wreaking havoc around vancouver (ie reading, drinking coffee, playing freelancer, bitching about post-marxist social theory which he still feels is 'conspiratorial' and 'for hippies') with my lovely visitor, the detached observer.

now ive been thrown back into the vicious cycle of tutoring, editing peoples' essays (stop asking me, damn you, i dont even get good marks), blogging/livejournaling, and getting around to submitting my assignments.

of course, im taking a break today because it is my birthday.  i am now 22, which means i have to become more mature and reserved.  really, i'd feel more like it was time to act old if i didn't get asked for id every time i want to see an 18+ film or buy alcohol.

sfu racist kids are mobilizing

this post has made me a little concerned regarding the state of anti-racism efforts on sfu campus.  it was written by a supposedly bright kid - an ex parliamentary page studying in sfu's well-recognized communications program. 

1. This is not a racist post
2. I am not alone in these thoughts
3. I have been asked to write this
4. It deserves some attention

evidence it is a racist post:
1. "The problem is that the people who laud it [lmulticulturalism] don't really stop to think about what people might not like about it. How is it that in a multicultural country, I can go to Richmond and have trouble finding a sign in English, or go to Surrey and think I'm in Pakistan? This doesn't very multicultural."

yeah. ethnic communities are not multicultural at all.  multiculturalism = them coloured people speakin english and openin restaurants to serve us food!

2. "Another point that's been brought up is that people move here and continue to live like they're back in China or India. No. You're in Canada now. We have laws that aren't like yours. Please make an effort to abide by them or you can pack your bags and leave my country."

yeah.  i wish i had something to say to this... its just.. too... ugh.

3. "But at Clubs Days when I walk around and see fifty tables of Asian clubs paying attention soley to Asians I have to scratch my head and wonder what exactly it is they're trying to do."

theyre trying to recruit people to the chinese christian club, the singapore-malaysia club, the taiwanese club, or the canadianized asian club.  maybe to you they 'all look the same' but there is a reason there are several asian clubs.

4. "Tell me how these people are contributing members to Canadian society then? If you make no effort to try and learn the language of your new home then something is seriously wrong with you."

despite the province article on the state of esl funding, the immigration rules in place favour immigrants who speak english or french.  while this kid lived in bilingual ottawa, most of his friends were anglophones, yet he spoke french.  i guess there must be something to be said for wanting to be with people who speak your mother tongue...

5. "Newsflash, the minority at this school is white skinned mofos like me. So in that case shouldn't we be the ones with all the clubs? Oh no, that wouldn't be politically correct and I'm sure it would be taken as bigotry in some way ... Seriously, why not? We are the minority on this campus so we should be able to. And we're not racist of exclusive or bigoted, but if you don't look like us or don't speak our language or have no European ancestry then you can fuck right off because that's not the type of person we want in this club."

wouldnt it make more sense if larger campus presence = larger and more clubs?  croquet aficionados are a minority on your campus... should there be 80 croquet clubs to make up for the fact that the  varsity sports get all the attention? 

7. "It's perfect, we already speak either official language, like beer, like hockey, contribute to society by leaving our communities and doing something and can network with numerous people who AREN'T ALL OF THE SAME RACE."

beer + hockey + having a non-white friend = contributing to canadian society... got it?

8. "So if this post has pissed you off into thinking that "this guy is an asshole" then think about it this way; my point is that integration vs being exclusive is much more nice. And yes it is possible to integrate without losing your culture. We aren't the U.S. here."

so you want asian folk to stop associating amongst themselves.  basically, you DO favour us-style assimilation, but youre calling it integration.

9. "So, if you like hockey, beer, Bob&Doug, you say Eh, you think the Hip are the essential Canadian band, listen to the Arrogant Worms, think that Don Cherry is our greatest politician, can argue at length about politics in a polite way, think George Bush is a retard, live in a Igloo, and have a PM who's name is Poutine, then the CCC WANTS YOU!"

with all due respect, how can someone simultaneously think don cherry is our greatest politician and be polite in political discussion?  more to the point, how can someone call a foreign head of state a "retard" while being polite in a political discussion...

please, if this has bothered you in any way, go comment on his blog.

vancouver, according to the new york times

this post is your recommended reading for the day.  the new york times is attempting to depict vancouver as some kind of drug crime hotbed that will corrupt the peaceful oasis known as america through the shockingly porous canadian border. 

analogous to your 300 lb aunt telling you that youve put on 15 lbs since school started, this article would be more amusing if it wasnt so depressing to consider the implications of these perceptions of vancouver.  these sensationalized, paranoid declarations wont generate anything besides catchy headlines, faux reporting, and opportunities for two-bit members of congress/senate to get those wonderful 'concerned' soundbites on the record. 

lets look at some more funny bits:
Kayakers paddle them south from British Columbia across the freezing bays of America's northwest corner:  freezing?  here?  it was 17 degrees celsius a week ago and it hasnt snowed since january.

Canada, which is debating decriminalizing personal marijuana use but is also considering stiffer penalties for marijuana growers, tends to mete out much lighter sentences than the United States courts for drug-related offenses, a situation that has American law enforcement officials - and even Canada's own police force - increasingly frustrated:  yeah, it must be frustrating to watch a country build its marijuana policy to target gangs and growers instead of hippies and frat boys.  obviously we should just clog our jails with every single person who has ever lit a joint instead of going after violent gang people.

The major criminal organizations moving the drugs and guns, law enforcement officials say, are outlaw motorcycle gangs, particularly the Hells Angels, who have denied involvement but who law enforcement officials say do everything from growing to smuggling the drugs. Vietnamese and other Asian groups tend to specialize in growing, and Indo-Canadians have a niche is transporting the drugs, according to Mr. Winchell, of the United States Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency, and Inspector Nadeau: yeah. the bikers are buttressed by scary asians and scary brown people. 

really, it all comes down to the stats, available on the sinister thoughts post i linked to at the beginning... but who needs stats when youre on the cutting edge of reporting, telling people vancouver is the *new* crime haven.

nina hagen and design woes

nina hagen live was something else.  unfortunately, some old dudes like to get disgustingly drunk and pick a lot of fights at concerts, which almost killed the vibe during a particularly feminist song.  i can't say every single one of her onstage rants resonated with me, but it was nice to finally see her in the flesh after all these years.  my! gay! husband! opened, and despite the stupid abuse of punctuation in their name, they were quite good as well, if you like the abrasive synths + yelling approach to music.

you might have noticed the design of this pithy web-polemic change 10 or so times in the past day.  im really quite sick of my layout and i do not have sufficient html/css skills to put what id like onto a screen.  as a result, i will be tinkering with this until the end of time.

some televangelist is screaming about snoop dogg and the internet being the root of all evil.  see what you people miss by *not* being awake at 4:33 ...

lotusland vs old man winter, round one

we have about five centimetres of snow outside.  this being vancouver, school has been cancelled.  as you can see from the picture, the curb (or kerb if you speak limey) isnt even covered.  there is hardly any snow out there but none of us know how to drive in it so we are staying home.

such is the lotusland way.

posting like a mofo

only two more days left in the first term and im sleeping for 4 hours every night finishing up the last of the term papers before the cruel tempest known as the exam period descends upon us, after which im ditching vancouver for a few days in boston to see the sasha, which will be fun except for the parts when he makes me watch star trek.  must we be so predictably MIT?  cognizant of the myriad benefits associated with being the sasha's ho of choice, i will not protest too much.

curiously, this lack of sleep has given me more energy than i actually need to expend on writing and researching.  as a result, my sister and i just spent four hours making german literature gingerbread cookies for the german party.    we have marx with a coconut beard, nietzsche's madman with jujube lantern, a deconstructed paul celan, red-faced gustav von aschenbach, suggestive freud and jelinek, couples doing the nasty from 'hands around,' hesse's siddartha, remarque's soldiers, siegfried and brunhilde, and a really cute fanny lewald.

in light of how much pleasure i derived from this, it's funny how i think i can get away with insinuating sasha is the geek in the relationship. 

sushi vs starbucks!

i have spent the last few days at ubc subsisting on iced americanos, iced unsweetened black tea, avocado rolls, inari, and cucumber rolls in the ubc village, where 2 sushi places are across from the starbucks.

Vancouver's food obsessions

Sometimes it seems like we're overrun with Starbucks and sushi. How did we get that way -- and which one rules?

by Chad Skelton, Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Hidekazu Tojo, Vancouver's leading sushi chef and owner of Tojo's restaurant on West Broadway, goes back to Japan at least once a year. He has no doubt that people in Vancouver eat more sushi than anywhere else in North America.
But he thinks the city's sushi obsession is even bigger than that. Vancouver, he said, has become the sushi capital of the world.

"Vancouverites eat more sushi than Japanese people," he said.

Tojo is credited by many, including himself, with an innovation that turned sushi from an obscure ethnic food to mainstream fare: the inside-out roll. Traditional Japanese sushi is wrapped in nori -- thin seaweed paper -- with the rice and seafood inside. Tojo said he realized in the early 1970s that the nori was turning many white customers off sushi. "People hated sushi at that time [because] it looked like black paper," he said. "So I hid it." Tojo put the nori on the inside of the roll, wrapping the rice and filling around the outside -- the form used for most of the most popular rolls now, such as California rolls.
"When I did it inside out ... then it became very popular," he said. Tojo is also credited with inventing the B.C. Roll -- with barbequed salmon skin and cucumber -- one of the most popular rolls in the city.

When it comes to Vancouver's food obsessions, it's hard to compete with sushi. But right after our B.C. rolls, sashimi and bento boxes, there are few things Vancouverites love more than our tall lattes, espresso shots and Frappuccinos.
Vancouver's first Starbucks opened in 1987 in a small kiosk in the SeaBus terminal on Cordova. It was the first Starbucks outside of Seattle and only the ninth Starbucks ever. There are now more than 7,800 Starbucks in 34 countries.

So, of our twin obsessions, which one wins out? Which are there more of in our city: Sushi or Starbucks? Figuring that out is not an easy task.

While Starbucks knows how many stores it has in the Lower Mainland -- 121 -- no one keeps track of how many sushi restaurants there are. However, according to business listings, there are 175 restaurants in the Lower Mainland with the word "sushi" in their name -- from Ajisai Sushi Bar on West 42nd to Zero One Sushi on Bute. Another 138 restaurants have the word "Japanese" in their name. That works out to, at minimum, 313 sushi restaurants in the region -- more than twice the number of Starbucks and, incidentally, more than three times the number of McDonald's (99).

In the downtown core alone, there are more than 50 sushi restaurants (see map). And both Starbucks and sushi continue to grow. Starbucks has opened 11 new Vancouver outlets in just the past year alone. And sushi restaurants keep on popping up across the city. For years, one block of Davie Street, from Thurlow to Bute, contained four sushi restaurants. Last fall, a longtime Korean restaurant in the same block closed down and reopened weeks later -- as the block's fifth sushi spot.

Will Vancouver reach a point where it cannot sustain any more Starbucks or sushi outlets? Is there a limit to how much caffeine and sticky rice we can consume? Tojo, for one, thinks Vancouver is reaching a sushi saturation point. "I think it's enough now," he said. As for Starbucks, Monachello said he can't say at what point Vancouver will have enough of them. "I don't think I could speculate where the limits are," he said.

why snail mail is more fun

these postal experiments are hilarious.

The Postal Service appears to be amazingly tolerant of the foibles of its public and seems occasionally willing to relax specific postal regulations ... First, this experiment yielded a 64% delivery rate (18/28), an almost two-thirds success rate. (For our purposes, "delivery" constituted some type of independent handling by the USPS and subsequent contact regarding the object, regardless of whether we got to see or keep the object or whether it arrived whole.) This is astounding, considering the nature of some of the items sent. This compares with a 0% rate of receipt of fully wrapped packages from certain countries of the developing world, such as Peru, Turkey, and Egypt. Admittedly, those were international mailings, and thus not totally comparable; nevertheless, the disparity is striking.

Second, the delivery involved the collusion of sequences of postal workers, not simply lone operatives. The USPS appears to have some collective sense of humor, and might in fact here be displaying the rudiments of organic bureaucratic intelligence.

Finally, our investigation team felt remorse for some of its experimental efforts, most particularly the category "Disgusting," after the good faith of the USPS in its delivery efforts. We sought out as many of the USPS employees who had (involuntarily) been involved in the experiment as we could identify, and gave them each a small box of chocolate.

We, and all scientists, owe a debt of gratitude to these civil servants. Without them, we would have had but little success in pushing the envelope.

postmodernism, the game.

the best postmodern flash game on the face of the earth... dedicated to gallo, for obvious reasons. if you are writing a paper and you have writer's block and you haven't slept more than six hours in two days, i would definitely play it. it's so pleasant!

if you see me doing something besides schoolwork, any of you, please spray me with bear mace and throw me into the koerner library stacks with bic lead pencils, an 80 pg notebook, triplus fineliners in all the colours, 2.5 cm paper post-it flags, and my green schoolbag with all the books in it, not my book bag... don't even look in my book bag. yes.

the lotusland miracle hangover cure

from stories of sir john a to hospitality suites at party conventions to the first-year poli sci student 2 days before a term paper is due, drinking is a big part of canadian politics.

the hangover assistance we've all heard runs the gamut from conventional wisdom, like "a denny's breakfast does the trick" to science-based tips to drink water and eat burnt toast cos "carbon helps" to sanctimonious rants about the glory of straightedge, sober living.

the lotusland hangover cure
you will need:

gross 99-cent pizza
a vegetable samosa
a california roll
2 litres of water
a cup of vegetable-based soup, preferably pea

before bed: drink one litre of water and eat the nasty pizza
the next day: drink the other litre, and eat the soup, cali roll, and samosa

inexplicably, this works. feel free to adjust the amounts to suit your needs.

deliriously glad to have returned to vancouver

i spent much of the past evening finding 15 machiavelli books to supplement the articles i've been (embarassingly) slowly accumulating for my paper. a few days ago, i posted about missing french having transferred to an english university. koerner had quite a few relevant titles in the langue de molière. i'm sorry for choosing that phrase - it's one an old northern québécois boss of mine uses. i also got a few books in italian, just to see if i'm at least competent enough to take notes from an italian text for an english essay. if my parents see this pile of books, they'll accuse me of being a snob and a nerd.

is it proper to accord machiavelli the credential associated with swift and orwell, that of pioneer in candour? do we ignore the fact he preached evil and focus on his literary skill, the capacity in which admirers of the french revolution respect the impassioned prose of edmund burke. it is curious that the great conservative inspirations wrote in much livelier, agreeable prose than most of the left featured on introductory syllabi.

my paper attempts to ascertain that machiavelli is not a preacher of evil. haha. maybe. i'm going to re-read the prince and see whether my initial judgements stand the sober second reading. is it just me, or are canadians immune to the phrase "sober second" ...

right.

i spent the latter portion of the night at acadia beach with a friend. ubc is so awesome for that. we talked for ages and then went for pho' and asian beer.

i feel like there's not enough evidence of girl on this blog.