Category Archives: Canada

Ghost Story Part One

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From the Archive

So this is the story:

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.

“You’re dead. Leave me alone.”

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.

the rainforest is out of water

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 Temperate Rainforest at its best

It’s true. The temperate rainforest of BC is out of water, or at least Not-Ucluelet is.

What’s Not-Ucluelet, you ask? Well, it’s a wee hippie town that we’ve blogged before on here the ol’ raincoaster blog, and it’s a town that I love dearly.

But verily, it is a town overrun with tourists and incompetent or ineffectual management.

Looks damp enough, don't it?For lo, although they recieve on average three metres (over nine feet) of rainfall, and they are slung around a harbour right smack-dab, yes RIGHT smack-dab on the Pacific Ocean, they are plumb out of H20.

How’d that happen? Glad you asked.

Hotels, resorts and other commercial businesses in this Vancouver Island tourist town are being told to shut down because of an extreme water shortage, a situation the mayor is describing as one of panic.

Mayor John Fraser said water is so scarce there are concerns about whether there would be enough if there were a fire in the town.

“That’s why the panic’s on,” he said Tuesday afternoon.

The District of Not-Ucluelet issued an order to move to Level 5 regulations. The highest Level 6 means a complete shutoff of the taps.

“This is serious,” said Leif Pedersen, administrator for the District of Not-Ucluelet.

“We’re communicating with resorts, asking them to contact guests and advise them they possibly don’t want to come out there right now.

“It’s going to close all commercial activity in Not-Ucluelet...”

Been there, done the marathon. No t-shirt, though

But Pedersen said high demand and low supply, the result of low rainfall since July, has meant the district’s main reservoir on M—– Island has been drawn down.

When asked how much water was left, Pedersen replied: “We don’t know…”

“Three days notice and we have to what, call every reservation and try and say good luck finding somewhere else, you can’t come?”

Not-Ucluelet is a remote tourist town just outside the breathtakingly beautiful Pacific Rim National Park. It is home to some world-renowned resorts, including the beach-front Wickaninnish Inn.

It borders on a UNESCO Biosphere and Clayoquot Sound [where, by the way, timber companies have just announced plans to resume logging] and draws visitors for a variety of natural attractions from whale watching to surfing.

Municipal staff spent Tuesday morning calling local businesses, asking them to cut back on water or shut down.

The public notice issued Tuesday was blunt, using Yep, no water herecapital letters to hammer home the severity of the problem.

“The WATER SHORTAGE has become extremely severe,” it reads.

“All lodging, food service businesses are asked to shut down PRIOR TO FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1ST, 2006 until further notice. Other commercial water users must not consume any water whatsoever.”
…
Whaylon Arthur, a Not-Ucluelet resident, said municipal staff should have had more foresight and warned people this could be coming.

“It’s a bit drastic and it’s a bit panicky,” he said.

But Pedersen said the district did its best.

Last week, the municipality implemented Level 4 water regulations, meaning residents were prohibited from washing boats and vehicles or watering lawns and gardens.

Oh. Well then. That totally should have done it. After a week of not washing boats and letting the marigolds fend for themselves, that should easily have made up for the estimated million or so tourists who’ve already been through town so far this year.

You know about tourists, right? What do they do? They shower, they bathe, they use the hot tub, they get their cars washed. Decadence, sheer decadence, but you add a million showers time average four-day stay up and you lose one hell of a lot of water.

It’s not like the town didn’t see this coming, which is where we get into the “bad management” part of things.

The single most bitterly Beckettian aspect to this is that the mayor, John Fraser, is the same mayor who has been trying to force through a proposal to approve character-based theme parks and, get this, water slides.

When’s the next election?

Can we be frank?

the woolly mammoth rises again!

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Woolly Frickin' Mammoth, yo!

So how frickin’ cool is this? There are plans afoot (oh, those scientists! Always up to mischief!) to take the now-discovered-to-be-viable sperm from Woolly Mammoth corpses preserved in the tundra, and use it to impregnate an Asian Elephant, their closest living relative.

Not a particular Asian Elephant. That would be pervy, and more than a little strange. It’s not like they’ve been lying in the permafrost, waiting for some Indian Britney of pachydermic pulchritude to mature before awakening their long-dormant seed, like so many lusty geezers in a home, gathered around the tv, watching Miss Universe.

No, this is, like, way more normal and not at all Jurassic Parkian, oh not in the least. All perfectly safe, they assure us, the scientists.

The scientists whose reputations and fortunes depend upon doing this, regardless of the risks, are quite adamant that it’s not going to be another Jurassic Park in any way, shape or form.

Oh, hold the phone:

A team of Japanese genetic scientists aims to bring woolly mammoths back to life and create a Jurassic Park-style refuge for resurrected species. The effort has garnered new attention as a frozen mammoth is drawing crowds at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan…

Their plan: to retrieve sperm from a mammoth frozen in tundra, use it to impregnate an elephant, and then raise the offspring in a safari park in the Siberian wild.

Mammoth herd, how frickin' cool is that?Well, nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan; if the not-really-woolly-but-perhaps-in-need-of-a-good-waxer half-breed herd got loose in the Siberian Tundra, there’s no way they could survive an environme-…

Well. Still. Frickin’ cool. Even the Times lost its treasured journalistic objectivity over this one:

Mammoths may roam again after 27,000 years
By Mark Henderson, Science Editor
 
BODIES of extinct Ice Age mammals, such as woolly mammoths, that have been frozen in permafrost for thousands of years may contain viable sperm that could be used to bring them back from the dead, scientists said yesterday.
Research has indicated that mammalian sperm can survive being frozen for much longer than was previously thought, suggesting that it could potentially be recovered from species that have died out.

Several well-preserved mammoth carcasses have been found in the permafrost of Siberia, and scientists estimate that there could be millions more.

Last year a Canadian team demonstrated that it was possible to extract DNA from the specimens, and announced the sequencing of about 1 per cent of the genome of a mammoth that died about 27,000 years ago.

With access to the mammoth’s genetic code, and with frozen sperm recovered from testes, it may be possible to resurrect an animal that is very similar to a mammoth.

The mammoth is a close genetic cousin of the modern Asian elephant, and scientists think that the two may be capable of interbreeding.

The frozen mammoth sperm could be injected into elephant eggs, producing offspring that would be 50 per cent mammoth…

“Restoration of extinct species could be possible if male individuals are found in permafrost,” Dr Ogonuki said.

“If sperm of extinct mammalian species, for example the woolly mammoth, can be retrieved from animal bodies that were kept frozen for millions of years in permanent frost, live animals might be restored by injecting them into oocytes [eggs] from females of closely related species.”

Although without question the proud daddy will be disinherited immediately. They’re very old-fashioned, you know.

Mammoth skeleton, unlikely to become a daddy at this point but still frickin' cool!

TWAT: The War Against Tees Part Deux: Revenge of the Tees!

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From BoingBoing. If you need a refresher about The War Against Tees, click here.

It seems Arab-looking people are not allowed to wear Arabic lettering on their tee-shirts in American airports, or at least not if JetBlue has anything to do with it.

Now, I can tell you from personal experience that white people can.

It’s true the sample size wasn’t large, but it was in this case equal to the other test, so I’m calling it equivalent. And it’s also true that I was wearing it in gold, rather than printed on 100% cotton or even a poly/cotton blend, which would naturally be somewhat suspicious, especially in business class.

But then again, the only item I had that identified me as an Arab sympathizer was a nameplate necklace, the name of which did not correspond to the name on the expired passport I was carrying as my only ID.

And the nice formerly-Iranian lady at US Customs and Immigration who could, as it happened, read Arabic perfectly well, which is a helluva lot more than I can do, laughed when she read my passport and said “So I guess your name is not Cheryl then? That’s what your necklace says.”

And indeed it is not. I said that in that case my sister had my necklace, we shared a chuckle, she handed my passport back, and I got on the plane. End of story.

Then again, not only is my name not Cheryl, but I don’t even look like a Cheryl. 

More to the point, I don’t look like an Almira, either.

I am not a terrorist. I am just a t-shirt wearer

T-shirt: “I am not a terrorist,” in Arabic
Tim Murtaugh tells BoingBoing,

 After reading about blogger Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK (he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight), I finally stopped being depressed about the war on terror and began being proactively pissed off. I made this shirt, which says “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I plan to wear it every time I go to the airport from now on.

On the t-shirt site, Tim says: “All the shirts are set to $1.00 more than the Spreadshirt base price — all profits will be sent to the ACLU.”

minimatters

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From the Archive

Thursday, September 19, 2002

Yaletown mosaic

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.

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 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.

“What’s up Sandy?”

“I just bought a new car!”

“Oh?”

“Actually, I just bought two of them.”

“Oh?”

“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.”

“The Hastings?”

“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.
A friend