Friday, June 24, 2005
Okay, so I m turning over all kinds of rocks looking for a job here. Going to interviews only to find out the company is hiring people to write high-school papers for foreign students. Scripting internet porn (who knew it was scripted?
???
). Pyramid-scheming for the Russian mob. But this has to be the all-time worst writing job I ve ever seen; the earnest, wholesome and chatty veneer is the blood-curdling icing on the - sorry - cake.
We re pleased you re joining the growing number of women (and men) who realize that good grooming includes the previously ignored area down there s not just about hygiene either.
Where do you go when you have a question about shaving, or you want to share your own hysterical story? [totally; nothing goes together like pubes, razors and hysteria!
] Right here! Our writers and editors are working around the clock to dig up any and every bit of information regarding - what else - Hair Care Down There.
Articles, Q A s, tips and a place to swap ideas, all updated the minute we unearth something new.
We value and welcome your suggestions and contributions and we invite you to visit often.
December 8th, 2006 at 2:20 am My friend Sandy is great. The most outgoing person you ll ever meet who isn t annoying, she s the kind of person who was born with invisible pom-poms in one hand and an invisible Martini in the other: half Noel Coward and half Barbie.
I was in her store a few months back, and she was telling me how much she was looking forward to getting her car paid off, ticking off the days on the calendar until FREE CAR DAY. Her eyes sparkled, even though they had glitter on the lids they sparkled from the eye part, the Sandy part, and although the glitter still sparkled it looked dull compared to the Sandy sparkle. And it was last year s colours anyway.
So a couple of months later I go back to the store. I generally don t go so often, as I have little money with which to make purchases there, which is sort of why the store is there and why Sandy in particular is there, to sell stuff, which she rarely succeeds in doing to me, but then no-one does, much of ever.So back to the store I go, even though I still do not have any money.
And there she is, Miss Yaletown, sparkling fit to beat the band, whatever the hell that means. What s up Sandy?
I just bought a new car!
Actually, I just bought two of them.
Well, my brother wanted a car for grad [I got a pen for mine] and the bus was not on with me, not after the first couple of times.
You got it.
Even the Davie. I d just had enough, so I talked to my Dad and we thought we would get, like, a bulk discount if we bought two of the same car, one for me and one for Paul. He doesn t care what kind of car he gets, anything I d drive is good enough for him cause he doesn t know what people in the Big City drive and he knows I ve got that covered.
I went next door, to the Mini dealership, and bought two. They were like, Sandy, don t you want to take one for a drive first? Nope, I know what I want.
I want a red one.
Who could argue with that? The car has some powerful magical mojo; she was downtown today, doing makeup at a posh wedding, at a posh hotel, and as soon as she arrived she realized she d forgotten her wallet.
People in Vancouver don t keep parking meter cash in their cars; well, dumb ones do, and they can never figure out how their windows get broken so often anyway, she had not a sou. Couldn t use the valet parking in case they paid by cheque and she couldn t cash it in time. She was stuck.
But there was a spot right out front. She grabbed it, city-honed reflexes in control. She sprang from her Mini to the lobby, from the lobby to the elevator, from the elevator to the hallway, to the suite, to the bride herself, for whom she recited the tale (in doubletime) and from whom she begged a toonie.
Out of the suite, into the hall, into the elevator, into the lobby, onto the sidewalk (doorman only just got the glass door in time) and thrust the toonie into the parking meter. It gave her an hour.
The job took two.
The bride tipped her $45, which she figured would pay for her parking ticket and enough for lunch. Back she went, out of the suite, into the hall, into the elevator, into the lobby, onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and there she saw it.
A piece of paper, tucked carefully under her windshield wiper.
Picking her heart out of her shoes, she sulked her way over to the offensive scrap and wrenched it from her precious car. It read:
November 27th, 2006 at 4:53 am from the archive, but it could have been written tonight for that matter.
As I slump here in front of my blue, glowing screen, coughing like Tuberculosis Mary, occasionally wiping mysterious dots of liquid off the monitor (even though they sure are purty with the little rainbows around the edges) and with, apparently, no lining left in my throat at all, I remember the good old days.
Like last month.When I could still get outside and go for a skate. Sometimes I encounter something that gives me faith in civilization, and the Vancouver Seawall is one of those things.
Other times I stare out at crowds and think just look at them all walking on their hind legs like that but that s a story for another day. Like I said, the Seawall I like. Especially now that I can get to it within five minutes, three if the lights are right.
One of the best things about living on the Downtown EastSide is the fine sense of proportion developed by the cops. It s technically illegal to rollerblade down a major road, or ANY sidewalk, let alone skate down Main Street itself right past the Cop Shop and Court House with an off-leash collie trucking along the sidewalk, pacing you. Once I was spotted by a total keener of a cop who gave me a disgusted look and signaled me over to the sidewalk, no doubt to give me a thick sheaf of tickets, so I thought, as I often do, let s see if showing off will do us any good.
I skated slowly over and as I did I said to the dog, Lady, left side, and the dog obediently went to the left side of the sidewalk. I said, Lady, right side, and the dog obediently got up and went to the right side of the sidewalk. I said, Lady, middle, and the dog went to the middle of the sidewalk and stood there looking up at the cop with her big innocent brown eyes.
I refer to the collie, you understand. The cop gave me an even more disgusted look and waved us away. Face it, your run of the mill Border Collie is probably smarter than Jamie Graham.
Not to mention they have bigger fish to fry in this neighborhood.From my house you can get to Waterfront Road easily, and follow that under Canada Place till it joins up with the new part of the Seawall, between there and Stanley Park. There s half a dead rat on the road right beside Crab Park, but it s flat enough you can skate right over it.
Or you can go the other way, onto the old Indy track and join up with the Seawall at Science World; that s nice, because then you can go the south route to Granville Island or head to Stanley Park again from the other side, only instead of passing through pancaked, dried rats you get to go through Yaletown. I for one always enjoy the sight of mountain bikes that cost more than a year s housing and get a cheap laugh out of Porche SUV s, especially when used to ferry a 95 pound woman. Some jokes stay funny, you know what I m telling you?
Once, I was skating through Yaletown by the playing fields, skiing a little bit on the downhills and getting a great bang out of the experience now that I was pretty good, feeling all Malibu Barbie in my pink flowered Pucci-style Victoria s Secret Miracle Bikini, and I passed a couple of guys skating the other way. They turned and stared. One said to the other, Now you see why this is better than ice skating?
November 26th, 2006 at 6:58 am from the Archive, and you should read first. I mean, you can go ahead and read this one first instead, but that s probably only your best option if you enjoy being confused and experiencing the futility of busted and ersatz suspense. In which case you should be reading and leaving me the hell alone.
I have cracked the mystery of Screamer, Screamer 2.0, Yeller and Whoo!It s all the fault of indie music.
That rock an roll gits the blood ta boilin and the youngun s git up ta all kinda mischief.Pat s Pub in the Patricia Hotel now features the few local bands who do not actually suck. They ve even made it into the , twice.
That s lovely. Vancouver needs good local music groups. Vancouver does not need groups of incoherent yet voluble and active drunks spilling out onto the street at 2am.
Face it, if they re loud enough that the locals in this locale are complaining, they re just too damn loud.
Patricia, sweetie darling, could you maybe get them a room or something? You always prided yourself on being the only respectable hotel on the Downtown EastSide, so why not live up to that?
How about having your bouncers follow them and smack them around a little bit when they start with the Whoo, Scream, Scream, and Yell? Is that too much to ask? Wait, let me help you
The first few nights I thought he was trying to flag a cab.
Then I thought he was trying to flag a hooker. Then I thought he was keeping six, and this was a more subtle form of yelling Cheez it! when the cops turned up.
Still don t know, but it s damn annoying.
There s a whistler in this town, and he comes out after midnight. If this were the Scottish moors he could call a collie a mile away; this is the kind of whistle that passes through stone and steel and my bedroom window as if they weren t there.
He sounds off about once every 90 seconds, for couple of hours, and downpours do not deter him. Sometimes there are bursts of whistles, sometimes just one. The bursts are not musical, just the same rising note, a nonverbal questionmark.
I wonder what the question is.
The screamers are back. Tonight, there were two: a man and a woman, and a yeller, all going at once, having, to all appearances or accoustances, a grand old time, screaming and screaming and yelling.
Yeller isn t angry, just loud enough that I can hear him a block over, and he yells alot. Some day instead of tuning him out I m going to listen to it. I ll either be bored or forced to testify: guess which is more likely!
And then there is Whoo! Whoo! (not to be confused with John Woo, the Hong Kong phenom of film) Whoo!
is a guy whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word, the aforementioned Whoo! and a single volume setting, maximum. Foreigner was playing in town recently, and Supertramp is coming, so maybe he s just reliving the glory days of rock, when your Bic lighter and your Black Sabbath T-shirt were all you needed for a party.
It s nice to hear someone having such a good time in the neighborhood, but if I get him in a dark alley I m going to tell the junkies the cops might investigate all that noise and then I ll just walk away. No fingerprints.
What is up I do not know, but everyone around here is high as a kite and has been for days.
Things are crazy, which is the default in the neighborhood, but now they are the kind of crazy that makes people freak out and gets them life behind bars, not the normal kind of crazy that gets them called Napoleon and has them wash their hands facing north-northeast on Tuesdays.
The sidewalks are fairly quiet, except the drug market outside Carnegie, but the alleys have never seen such levels of activity (wouldn t call it life ). Quite a picture it makes, with the city gardeners watering the brightly flowered hanging baskets while in the background some grease-streaked Charles Manson lets off a fire extinguisher that he stole from a hotel so he can sell it to the pawn shop out front.
Vast clouds of white powder tumble into the air past windmill-armed beggars spinning the haze into tornadoes while in the forground a couple of junkies jitterbug as their synapses snap and the sunlight refracts into a million rainbows as the pansies and petunias are carefully sprinkled and tended. Some wild-eyed guy comes tearing down the street the wrong way, skateboarding a shopping cart, while behind him the cart s last illegal owner sprints madly; this is the Downtown EastSide version of an SUV, and not to be let go lightly. He is fitter, but much less desperate than the thief, who is skating for his life as well as his cart.
If he makes it to the old Indy track he s home free.
I begin to think I m staggering from a secondhand high, but it s just that every single pedestrian coming toward me lurches from left to right to left in unison. It s like the Rockettes performing a matinee in Hell.
I get that disoriented feeling you get in a train when you are sitting still and the train next to you begins to move. Are they moving, are they standing still? Am I?
And down by the train tracks I cannot figure out **what s** going on. I hear the chinga-chunga of a train motoring along the track but, though I have a clear view over the ten lanes of track, I cannot see a single car move. Maybe I m hearing my own wheels.
I stop. It continues, chunga-chunga-chunga and the immobile boxcars look at me strangely. They have inscrutable markings, from OCEAN JINGO LIMITED and from Oaph the tagger.
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin. I start skating again. The sound continues, pacing me; where the hell is it coming from?
After awhile the slope evens out and I see that all along I have been paced by flats, an enormous string of them, so long that the engine is out of sight; at three feet in height, they were hiding below the angle of the slope. An entire train, hiding and following me and driving me crazy. No wonder the other trains looked at me funny.
October 31st, 2006 at 10:10 am I know I ve already featured one of these brilliant mashups from , but it s Halloween and these images are unutterable shadow-paintings from beyond the veil. So there.
Once, I went out in the middle of the night for a long run.
I stopped by Shanghai Alley to do my stretches. There I was, huffing and puffing with my face a nice rosy pink like the nether parts of a slutty baboon and bent over in any number of undignified and unflattering poses, thinking about the way my greasy hair was sticking to my forehead and the way I looked in my baggy sweats. Along came a hooker, skinny the way they all are, with the bones sticking out and that look like they would shatter if you gave them a sharp rap.
She was very reluctantly following a customer into the bushes in the little park and when she saw me she called out,
Way to go, girl, way to be healthy. Not like a sick junkie hooker!
I replied, Yeah, but I m fatter than you, to keep the interaction going.
I mean, I wasn t going to take her for dinner, but you can t just drop it; that makes people feel so small. When they reach out of The Life you have to support them and not turn your back. Hell, it s the least you can do.
No, no, you look good, lookin healthy! You keep going, girl! and she went.
Never seen her since.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:29 pm speaking of which, I could use something hot and deep-fried.
Have I told you about shopping for food in my neighborhood?
Of course I have, and here I go again, but this time we will have no naked people (haven t had any in quite some time, but nevermind) we will have no Italians. We will have diner burgers. And where will we have them?
At the Ovaltine Cafe and Vic s Cafe and we will have a good Yuppie bouillabaisse at the Cook Studio Cafe. In fact, I think I will go have one right now to refresh my memory and also check out all the hot uniforms at lunchtime, subsequent to which I will update the blog.
Love that word, blog.
Blog, blog, BLOG! cool [sorry, was nOOb then]
Back from lunch. Alas, Cook Studio Cafe closes at 2, just before I got there; story of my life, born a month late and trying unsuccessfully to catch up ever since.
Went to mosey down to the Ovaltine or Vic s but felt guilty I was ducking my work, so decided to eat closer to where I had to work today. Somehow that made me feel less irresponsible.
Ended up at the Only, The Only Seafood Restaurant.
It s in a hellish stretch of Hastings amid pawn shops, storefronts that have been boarded up for twenty years, and really last-chance social agencies. The Only has been there since the early part of the last century, and is now run by a nice Chinese couple. They got a very nice writeup last week in Malcolm Parry s social column.
If you are one of the sorryass losers who goes to a seafood restaurant and orders beef you are SOL here, bud. There is nothing, I mean nothing, NOTHING on the menu but seafood. Halibut and chips, cod and chips, oysters fried raw stewed two ways, clams, mussels and/or chips.
And there is nobody here except almost-geezers with ballcaps on their heads and windbreakers on their backs who all look like they just came in from a round of golf or maybe a suburban barbeque. As soon as you sit down the woman shoves half a loaf of bread and a platter of butterpats at you, along with a half-quart of water in the kind of glass that can take a bullet and remain standing.
It was the most expensive lunch I ve had on the Downtown EastSide, which is to say that it came to $10 with the tip and pop.
But then, my oyster pepper stew (half order) was yummy, and so thick with oysters that it really should be called Bowl-O-Sters With Some Tomato Sauce. There were three fragments of vegimatter, God knows what it was, but there was about a half-pound of oysters, all cut up. You know, when you cut them up like that they look kind of like jelly rolls with tentacles on one side and it gets you to wondering what all the different colours are made up of.
A friend of mine went to high school out here and they made her dissect clams, oysters and mussels and now she can t eat shellfish anymore because she looks at it and knows what s the liver, what s the pulmonary apparatus I m glad I went to school in Ontario and I m glad I don t eat at restaurants that serve fetal pigs or frogs, though I ve heard some very expensive ones do.
But about the stew: never mind what it looked like, it was nice and peppery, with the true dinery flavour of Campbell s Tomato Soup hiding in there somewhere underneath the tsunami wave of pepper. Yummylicious.
And this is definitely a place you can dunk, so it was Dunk City for my lunch and I got through most of the bread.
The place is filled with mirrors: one long one running the length of the left-hand wall, and one huge, got-to-be-expensive one that makes up the back wall, about 8 x15 or so. I d be very surprised if it weren t one of those that you can see through from behind.
The kitchen is along the right-hand wall, behind a half-wall, and the counter comes out from there and makes two loops to the left. There are no tables. Ceiling is way up there, maybe 20 , and covered with either Lincrusta or a real old pressed tin ceiling.
Very Edwardian. Along the top of the left-hand wall above the mirror runs a very sixties mural of fishing, all in pastel marine greens and oranges, like the sort of thing Toni Onley might have done in Grade Nine.
Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of conversation, screams, and shouts coming through the completely clouded-over front windows.
It s like flipping though channels if only cop shows, Alfred Hitchcock, and Permanent Midnight are on tv. Ever seen Da Vinci s Inquest? This is the kind of conversation that preceeds the arrival of the coroner.
And the nice thing is: it s OUTSIDE!
Stop me if you ve heard this one, but here s a little something I wrote for back in 2002, when several crazy American strangers decided that nothing would make them happier than to fly me back East to meet a Danish-American movie star.
There are so many reasons this trip is impossible.
So many GOOD reasons. It IS impossible. But of course that has no bearing on the situation whatsoever; we are dealing with Americans here.
It must be pretty good; their previous record hits in a day was 700, and this went to 3500. When the hits are down, mention a Danish-American movie star, Beautiful Agony, Mango Porno, the blogs of murderous Goths, or, apparently, Foley s emails. Sure winners, every one.
It could be some time before I m back online (although, given that I m in Ontario, it can be no more than fifteen seconds before I m in the vicinity of yet another television with the volume up high) so this should tide you over till then. 24,000 words, if memory serves. Plus bonus photos!
September 24th, 2006 at 7:17 am is a home for my observations from and about the Downtown EastSide of Vancouver. It is not affiliated with that zine [now deceased] or the snobby club downtown.
All rights reserved, in fact, all rights revert to me including the right to own property.
I d like some, please. You can email it if you have a broadband connection, right?
You are welcome to read and to forward from the blog as long as you properly list me as the source.
Forwarding or appropriating content from this blog without properly crediting the source indicates your acceptance of the fact that I will remove both your right AND left legs, slowly.
August 31st, 2006 at 7:56 am From the Archive.
So there I am again, staying with James, only this time I brought my friend Katy.
Because she is new she gets the upstairs room, which I forget to mention to her is haunted. But it is. But she doesn t notice.
Odd.
But maybe not, because there I am, staying in the basement, right near the Indiana Jones tomb which I see has a nice new wooden frame around it now, all polished in an unhealthily obsessed way. I mean, if you had an unexplained little half-tunnel in your basement that looked like a home for a coffin, would you fix it up nice?
Anyway, I have to pass through the room with the tomb every time I go upstairs, which is a trial in the dark, let me tell you.
But if the ghost does not bother Katy it sure bothers me. It doesn t poke, it bangs.
Kathunk, kathunk, ping, ping, ping, BANG. **BANG**. Ping, ping, ping.
Kathunk you get the idea. It was a long night, especially when I went upstairs to get a drink and it banged and pinged its way up the stairs ahead of me. I told it it was dead and it should be quiet and go back to sleep or whatever it is that dead people who are not haunting do.
James s partner Tony says it s just the heater, but that fails to explain how the heater can preceed me invisibly up stairs, or how it can stand in the hall, all invisible and everything, waving and doing for all I know jumping jacks to get us to notice it. I notice it. I glare at it.
It does an invisible Tasmanian Devil routine every time I pass it to go to the bathroom, but all I ever say is You re dead. Get over it.
You know, I think it s very much like a little dog that wants to play.
Give it a little attention and it s a happy puppy. I bet it lives for my visits on second thought there s got to be a better way to put that.
There I am up in Vernon, staying with my friend James.
His house is haunted. I told him that last time I stayed up there, told him that not only did his new house have ghosts, but they were very pushy ghosts, poking at me every time I got up to go to the bathroom.
And he just looked at me like I had just crawled out of the gin bottle, which I had but that was not related!
If I d been sober I d never have told him at all.
James goes to sleep early, but I stay up till all hours and thusly encountered the poky ghosts. They poked me all the way from the living room (which I think aught to be reserved for the living; I mean, just look at the word but you can t get these dead people to listen to reason, you can t even get them to stop poking you and pay attention.
You sure can t get them to agree to split up the house, even though it s just so obvious that the basement room with the unexplained Indiana Jones tunnel just big enough for a coffin has to be ghost territory and the living room, I mean **hello?** the living room, should be for the animate to lie on the couch and watch Space Channel in peace with no spiritual visitors, no, not even if the Omen is on again) through the French doors, all the way down the hall and into the guest room, where they continued to poke at me from time to time as I lay in the bed, until finally, finally I was forced to address the issue directly.
Now normally there is nothing I avoid so much as addressing an issue directly.
Now normally there is nothing I avoid even more so much as confrontation with a disincorporated intelligence; it s faintly embarassing, as my own fleshiness points up the issue of their ectoplasmicism. We are both made uncomfortable. So this is something I generally avoid.
I am not, however, normally poked at so agressively. Sure, one or two quick tentacle-feels, maybe even a tentative arrow prick, but nothing like what I was undergoing now. I **had** to take action.
And did it do me any good at all? Hell no! Got not a moment s peace from that time on; poke-a-rama it was, with me all the time going, hey, stop that, you re dead!
Leave me alone! Oh, fine, ignore me, but you re still Dead! And I m Not!
Ow! You know, it wasn t my finest hour.
August 28th, 2006 at 4:45 pm 
Well this is odd.
Sometime in the last 72 hours someone (no idea who) labelled my blog as porn, using the handy-dandy Wordpress Label this blog Adult feature. Someone on the forum told me this is supposed to flag it for review and, if the blog is indeed found to be porn, it s taken off search engine updates, dropped from the Next Blog Tag Surfer Blog of the day Top Posts and Latest Posts rolls, and the blogger can no longer post comments, which I found out when I tried to inform whatsername with the Starbucks iced coffee coupon that it is, in fact, legit.
Well, now I have reason to believe that the instant someone tags the fucker with Porn it sticks, and only an appeal will get it out of the gutter and back into the starry sky.
So that s what happened. Sometime last night it dawned on me that my hits were half, count em, half what they should normally be, and that for some reason my posts weren t showing up where they should.
And this does not take me to my happy place.
I posted a question in the forum and sent in a Support Contact Form, as one is supposed to do. About six hours later (in fairness, it WAS the middle of the night) I get an email from Barry saying sorry, we checked your blog, it s fine, it had been porned and it s not, so you re good to go.
Surely, I thought, surely that would have given me some kind of period of immunity, like a vaccination.
Silly me.
Referrers is a stat table that lists the links that people have come to your blog through, and how many came through each. For today so far, mine looks like this:
Yes, someone has gone through 8 or more pages of Porn tags on Wordpress, looking for mine.
No doubt thinking if s/he can whine oh but she has 22 posts tagged porn it s an open and shut case. Well it s not, because I have never posted porn on this blog and I defy anyone to say it s not PG-13. Particularly since Photobucket took down my pictures of large public sculptures; okay, so the Boris Vallejo was a bit edgy.
Believe me, I m well aware of those boundaries, having dealt with that issue for several years.
Let s take a look at some of the blog entries tagged Porn on the ol raincoaster blog, shall we? Because we know you like to look at porn.
, which reproduced a BoingBoing post of a RyanAir ad about people (small, distant, probably Irish people) taking their clothes off at an airport.
, in which we discover I ve been linked to by both LibertyForum and Nastyfuckingporn.com, a link blog.
. The ever-popular. Beavers swimming in the Okanagan.
, an SNL skit starring guess who? Dirty puns, nothing more.
Ah yes, the infamous , an original piece of humour blogging from the Downtown EastSide, featuring stories that were just too funny to go in my book.
. How ironic.
Had a minor heartflip an hour ago when it appeared I d been re-porned, but Barry now tells me that s not the case and probably would advise me to take two asprin and get a life, if he weren t such a polite lad, but he is, and he can t help it.
UPDATE: all my comments, including the ones on this very blog, are now being labelled Spam and held for approval. Swellerific.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
My friend Sandy is great.
The most outgoing woman you ll ever meet who isn t annoying, she s the kind of person who was born with invisible pom-poms in one hand and an invisible Martini in the other: half Noel Coward and half Barbie.
I was in her store a few months back, and she was telling me how much she was looking forward to getting her old car finally paid off, ticking off the days on the calendar until FREE CAR DAY. Her eyes sparkled, even though they had glitter on the lids they sparkled from the eye part, the Sandy part, and although the glitter still sparkled it looked dull compared to the Sandy sparkle.
So a couple of months later I go back to the store. I generally don t go so often, as I have little money with which to make purchases there, which is sort of why the store is there and why Sandy in particular is there, to facilitate the making of purchases therein, which she rarely succeeds in doing to me, but then no-one does, much of ever.
So back to the store I go, even though I still do not have any money.
And there she is, Miss Yaletown, sparkling fit to beat the band, whatever the hell that means. As far as I know she would never beat a band, except maybe Coldplay, and only if they were really into that.
I just bought a new car!
Actually, I just bought two of them.
Well, my brother wanted a car for grad [I got a pen for mine] and the bus was not on with me, not after the first couple of times.
You got it.
Even the Davie. I d just had enough, so I talked to my Dad and we thought we would get, like, a bulk discount if we bought two of the same car, one for me and one for Paul. He doesn t care what kind of car he gets, anything I d drive is good enough for him cause he doesn t know what people in the Big City drive and he knows I ve got that covered.
I went next door, to the Mini dealership, and bought two. They were like, Sandy, don t you want to take one for a drive first?
Nope, I know what I want.
I want a red one.
Who could argue with that? The car has some powerful magical mojo; she was downtown today, doing makeup at a posh wedding, at a posh hotel, and as soon as she arrived she realized she d forgotten her wallet.
People in Vancouver don t keep parking meter cash in their cars; well, dumb ones do, and they can never figure out how their windows get broken so often anyway, she had not a sou. Couldn t use the valet parking in case they paid by cheque and she couldn t cash it in time. She was stuck.
But there was a spot right out front. She grabbed it, city-honed reflexes in control. She sprang from her Mini to the lobby, from the lobby to the elevator, from the elevator to the hallway, to the suite, to the bride herself, for whom she recited the tale (in doubletime) and from whom she begged a toonie.
Out of the suite, into the hall, into the elevator, into the lobby, onto the sidewalk (doorman only just got the glass door in time) and thrust the toonie into the parking meter. It gave her an hour.
The job took two.
The bride tipped her $45, which she figured would pay for her parking ticket and enough for lunch. Back she went, out of the suite, into the hall, into the elevator, into the lobby, onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel, and there she saw it.
A flapping, pathetic little piece of paper, tucked carefully under her windshield wiper.
Picking her heart out of her shoes, she sulked her way over to the offensive scrap and wrenched it from her precious car. It read:
I put some money in your meter because my wife has a Mini just like this.
August 27th, 2006 at 6:41 am From the Archive, see also :
Friday, September 20, 2002
It s an entertainment business.
Look for ways to leverage other entertainments and marketing efforts. Comme ca:
a) The MinuteLube had a sign: IN AND OUT IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, SATISFACTION GUARANTEED.
There was a hooker standing under it.
b) When the Canucks were in the playoffs, you could see every hooker in Mount Pleasant wearing Canucks tees, which is fine, but one large Native woman took it even farther, holding up a large sign that offered free extras if the Canucks won. I wonder what the extras were
The end of effective Iraqi resistance came with a rapidity which surprised us all, and we were perhaps psychologically unprepared for the sudden transition from fighting to peacemaking. True to the guidelines we had established, when we had achieved our strategic objectives (ejecting Iraqi forces from Kuwait and eroding Saddam s threat to the region) we stopped the fighting.
But the necessary limitations placed on our objectives, the fog of war, and the lack of battleship Missouri surrender unfortunately left unresolved problems, and new ones arose.
We were disappointed that Saddam s defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people.
Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S.
nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in mission creep, and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs.
Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.
The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.
N. s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.
S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome.
We discussed at length forcing Saddam himself to accept the terms of Iraqi defeat at Safwan just north of the Kuwait-Iraq border and thus the responsibility and political consequences for the humiliation of such a devastating defeat. In the end, we asked ourselves what we would do if he refused. We concluded that we would be left with two options: continue the conflict until he backed down, or retreat from our demands.
The latter would have sent a disastrous signal. The former would have split our Arab colleagues from the coalition and, de facto, forced us to change our objectives. Given those unpalatable choices, we allowed Saddam to avoid personal surrender and permitted him to send one of his generals.
Perhaps we could have devised a system of selected punishment, such as air strikes on different military units, which would have proved a viable third option, but we had fulfilled our well-defined mission; Safwan was waiting.
As the conflict wound down, we felt a sense of urgency on the part of the coalition Arabs to get it over with and return to normal. This meant quickly withdrawing U.
S. forces to an absolute minimum. Earlier there had been some concern in Arab ranks that once they allowed U.
S. forces into the Middle East, we would be there to stay. Saddam s propaganda machine fanned these worries.
Our prompt withdrawal helped cement our position with our Arab allies, who now trusted us far more than they ever had. We had come to their assistance in their time of need, asked nothing for ourselves, and left again when the job was done. Despite some criticism of our conduct of the war, the Israelis too had their faith in us solidified.
We had shown our ability and willingness to intervene in the Middle East in a decisive way when our interests were challenged. We had also crippled the military capability of one of their most bitter enemies in the region. Our new credibility (coupled with Yasser Arafat s need to redeem his image after backing the wrong side in the war) had a quick and substantial payoff in the form of a Middle East peace conference in Madrid.
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises.
In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors.
We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better.
This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq s invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
Have I told you about shopping for food in my neighborhood?
Of course I have, and here I go again, but this time we will have no naked people (haven t had any in quite some time, but nevermind) we will have no Italians. We will have diner burgers. And where will we have them?
At the Ovaltine Cafe and Vic s Cafe and we will have a good Yuppie bouillabaisse at the Cook Studio Cafe. In fact, I think I will go have one right now to refresh my memory and also check out all the hot uniforms at lunchtime, subsequent to which I will update the blog.
Love that word, blog.
Blog, blog, BLOG! cool
Back from lunch. Alas, Cook Studio Cafe closes at 2, just before I got there; story of my life, born a month late and trying unsuccessfully to catch up ever since.
Went to mosey down to the Ovaltine or Vic s but felt guilty I was ducking my work, so decided to eat closer to where I had to work today. Somehow that made me feel less irresponsible.
Ended up at the Only, The Only Seafood Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in Vancouver.
It s in a hellish stretch of Hastings amid pawn shops, storefronts that have been boarded up for twenty years, and really last-chance social agencies. The Only has been there since the early part of the last century, 1912 to be exact, and is now run by a nice Chinese couple. They got a very nice writeup last week in Malcolm Parry s social column.
If you are one of the sorryass losers who goes to a seafood restaurant and orders beef you are SOL here, bud. There is nothing, I mean nothing, NOTHING on the menu but seafood. Halibut and chips, cod and chips, oysters fried raw stewed two ways, clams, mussels and/or chips.
And there is nobody here except almost-geezers with ballcaps on their heads and windbreakers on their backs who all look like they just came in from a round of golf or maybe a suburban barbeque. As soon as you sit down the woman shoves half a loaf of bread and a platter of butterpats at you, along with a half-quart of water in the kind of glass that can take a bullet and remain standing.
It was the most expensive lunch I ve had on the Downtown EastSide, which is to say that it came to $10 with the tip and pop.
But then, my oyster pepper stew (half order) was yummy, and so thick with oysters that it really should be called Bowl-O-Sters With Some Tomato Sauce. There were three fragments of vegimatter, God knows what it was, but there was about a half-pound of oysters, all cut up. You know, when you cut them up like that they look kind of like jelly rolls with tentacles on one side and it gets you to wondering what all the different colours are made up of.
A friend of mine went to high school out here and they made her dissect clams, oysters and mussels and now she can t eat shellfish anymore because she looks at it and knows what s the liver, what s the pulmonary apparatus I m glad I went to school in Ontario and I m glad I don t eat at restaurants that serve fetal pigs or frogs, though I ve heard some very expensive ones do.
But about the stew: never mind what it looked like, it was nice and peppery, with the true dinery flavour of Campbell s Tomato Soup hiding in there somewhere underneath the tsunami wave of pepper. Yummylicious.
And this is definitely a place you can dunk, so it was Dunk City for my lunch and I got through most of the bread.
The place is filled with mirrors: one long one running the length of the left-hand wall, and one huge, got-to-be-expensive one that makes up the back wall, about 8 x15 or so. I d be very surprised if it weren t one of those that you can see through from behind.
The kitchen is along the right-hand wall, behind a half-wall, and the counter comes out from there and makes two loops to the left. There are no tables. Ceiling is way up there, maybe 20 , and covered with either Lincrusta or a real old pressed tin ceiling.
Very Edwardian. Along the top of the left-hand wall above the mirror runs a very sixties mural of fishing, all in pastel marine greens and oranges, like the sort of thing Toni Onley might have done in Grade Nine.
Adding to the atmosphere are the snippets of conversation, screams, and shouts coming through the completely clouded-over front windows.
It s like flipping though channels if only cop shows, Alfred Hitchcock, and Permanent Midnight are on tv. Ever seen Da Vinci s Inquest? This is the kind of conversation that preceeds the arrival of the coroner.
And the nice thing is: it s OUTSIDE!
Saturday, September 28, 2002
Would you think there could be a place of such hubris as to call itself Mount Pleasant even if it is not a mountain at all but just a big enough hill to be really intimidating to cyclists and rollerbladers and maybe the odd wheezy geezer, though great fun to roll down, though it is devoutly to be wished that they repair the damn cracks in the road before I end up eating pavement? I think not.
Where were we? Oh yes.
Mount Pleasant is another in this blog s cast of characters; the neighborhoods have names, but the neighbors don t.
Actually, for a Vancouver neighborhood it s really pretty neighborly and low-key. The Gucci quotient there is quite low, and the one and only time a Ferrari was parked outside the Starbucks it turned out to belong to Barry Neidermier, a skank who was making a living off smuggled cigarettes and smuggled 14-year-olds. One of the teenaged whores refused to testify until the cops went to her pad and rescued her teddy bear.
No lie.
But most of the people around there are from the deeper end 
of the gene pool. Mount Pleasant runs south along Main from Dysfunction Junction at Broadway right up to the peak of the Mount itself, which up around King Ed, in Queen E Park.
Broadway is actually Ninth avenue and King Ed is twenty-fifth, but nobody calls them that; it would be like calling John Wayne Marion. It s a nice, working-class place with neat little old houses, maybe in need of a coat of paint or two, and big, rambling Victorians with truly elaborate gardens and lowrise apartment buildings full of Filipino immigrants and poor families who all gather on the patio at the cocktail hour for a little ballroom dancing. It s quite a sight, I tell you; looks like a really, really casual wedding every single night.
Jeans and sweats are good enough for most, and some of the youngest have been known to waltz in Speedos, at least when the sprinkler is going on the lawn. The middle-agers are the best dancers, but the expression on their faces makes them look like radio-controlled evil clones or something; lighten up people!
The centre of this little universe is not the Community Centre, though it s lovely.
It s not the general store, there are too many. It s not even the yoga studio. It s the Starbucks.
But wait, you say, Starbucks is a synthesized, mass-produced global fast-food organization. Sure, you re right, sometimes it is.
But sometimes it isn t.
Sometimes it s something else completely.
They say if you stand at the door of the Ritz-Carleton long enough you will see everyone on earth pass by. Well I say if you sit at an outside table at the Mount Pleasant Starbucks long enough you will see everyone in the neighborhood at least once, and probably at least one person you haven t seen in twenty years, no matter where you re from.
It is the centre of the cosmos, at least on a very microcosmetic scale. There I learned all about how Pugs aren t the snotty little wretches they seem to be; a woman tied her tiny FooFoo to one of the tables and the little critter was so game and friendly that it dragged the table thirty feet around the corner so it could say hi to everyone. Remember, this thing is the size of an ankle boot.
Once, I was there with my sister from back east; doesn t matter where, it s all back east. Could be Paris, could be Plum Hollow, it s all just back east.
So there we were, so of course we went to the Starbucks.
They hadn t landed back east yet, so it was a new experience for her. We got in line behind a couple of cycle cops, also an unfamiliar sight to her eastern eyes.
No doughnuts?
What s up with that? she asked, incredulous. I believe in Ontario you aren t allowed to sell coffee unless you sell doughnuts as well.
I think you get three years.
The cop ahead of us reached the head of the line. He was still wearing his helmet, along with the military-geek shirt and the spandex shorts they wear.
He asked the barista, Is that bran muffin low-fat?
No, it was not.
Okay, then I ll have a multigrain bagel, dry, and a tall non-fat latte.
My sister turned to me and asked, What the hell kind of cop is that?
I walked in one day, having the kind of day where everything seems to be going my way for no reason at all, which is one of my favorite kind of days. I think I was going to get some coffee, though come to think of it there may have been snacking somewhere on the agenda, but just in a really casual sort of way.
I walked in. I listened. Oh, oh, it s one of my favorite songs!
I turned to the barista and asked, Steve! Is this the Committments tape?
Steve, a musician when not baristicating, gave me a look of unutterable scorn, the kind of look a pediatrician would shoot Goebbels, and he said:
I so white.
News RSS