Category Archives: Downtown Eastside

Crime Pays: Fundraiser for the Federation of BC Writers

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Cross–posted from the Shebeen Club

Who: The Federation of BC Writers and the Shebeen Club

What: a wicked good fundraiser for the Fed

When: Monday, March 16th, 6-9pm

Where: The Vancouver Police Museum, 240 East Cordova Street, Vancouver

Why: it would be criminal to miss this party!

Crime Pays film noir femme fatale

Wanted: YOU!

Come help the Fed celebrate 32 years of getting away with murder. Whether infiltrating schools, divvying up swag, or distributing subversive publications, the Federation of BC Writers has been operating unchecked in our province for decades.

Do you enjoy the vicarious thrill of rubbing shoulder pads with the Lost Literati of the Wild West, surrounded by instruments of murder and mayhem in the cosy confines of the police museum? Do you have what it takes to make your bones as a Fed member? There’s only one way to find out! Come out to the party and make us an offer we can’t refuse.

Admission: $20 minimum donation includes a drink and appetizers. Click here to register. If you won’t be attending, but would like to support the Fed, you can click the Paypal button in the sidebar to make an online donation in the amount of your choice.

Dress code: Trenchcoat and fedora, deerstalker and cape, jailhouse stripes, uniforms, Bond Villain suits or femme fatale slinkwear all optional but encouraged. Attitude absolutely mandatory.

This arresting experience will feature Western Canada’s first Poetry Brothel (five bucks buys a love poem read to you by a sexy stunner) as well as a Guys and Dolls date auction, so bring your chequebook! Our lineup of lads and lovelies will show the winning bidders the times of their lives, thanks to generous sponsorship from premier local entertainments.

Raffle prize donations, bribes, and sponsorship applications very welcome: please email lorraine.murphy at Gmail dot com. Anything related to crime or the theme of noir is particularly welcome, eg detective books, Martini glasses, etc, or anything black or white.

The Crime Pays fundraiser will be our Shebeen Club meeting for the month of March, so I hope to see everyone there, dressed fabulously and behaving infamously!

The Luck of the Irish

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Pull up a stool!

So, the other night I was, as I am not infrequently, at the bar of the Irish Heather, spending, as I do not infrequently, too damn much money for somebody who blogs for a living, and I met, as I not infrequently do, an Irishman.

I mean, where else would you? Right? Amiright?

And his Zimbabwean sidekick, Julius I’m Not Kidding You although he may have been telling a stretcher Caesar. Julius Caesar.

I never did catch the Irishman’s name, either because it was so exotic or because I have a cold and my ears were stuffed up with Strongbow I mean earwax now where was I?

Right. At the bar of the Irish Heather, talking about luck with a lanky, nameless Irishman and a black guy from Zimbabwe called Julius Caesar. They’d just gotten back from the Yukon, where they were checking out the dogsled race and NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP the one that goes all the way to Alaska, and thereupon I told them my story about the American Minutemen guarding the border and the time one of them shot himself in the foot and Canada refused to let him in, as he did not have proper identification documents and they must have laughed and laughed at Canadian Border Guard Union Headquarters over that one, oh yes.

And then the Irishman told me the secret of winning bar bets, which he then proceeded to prove by winning two toonies from me. But he bought me a Strongbow, so I figure I came out four bucks ahead when you figure tax into it which in Canada you always do, on general principles and yes, even in bar bets.

And this is the secret:

Get the other person to make a bet, and bet against him.

You’re welcome.

Operation Global Media Domination: The Sleep-Deprived Situation

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Because it is late/early and I have been up for 30 straight hours and I am somewhat punchy (and, you might have noticed, somewhat crabby lately), I am going to do a lightning round of Operation Global Media Domination.

Look at the searches that brought people to my blog! Mother would be so proud:

Search Engine Terms

These are terms people used to find your blog.

Today

Search Views
my first cthulhu 1 More stats
what does a classy whore look like 1 More stats
ovaltine shirts 1 More stats
britney spears handwriting 1 More stats
goatse 1 More stats
fairy 1 More stats

Yesterday

Search Views
fairy 85 More stats
britney sex tape 62 More stats
cthulhu 41 More stats
britney spears sex tape sex tape 28 More stats
audrey hepburn 27 More stats
steve jobs 20 More stats
christian bale remix 14 More stats
siegfried and roy 14 More stats
winona ryder sex 12 More stats
porn slideshow 12

And, yay, I got in the Vancouver Sun’s Digital Life blog with Fearless City. A couple of times, actually, but I’m too lazy/tired to find the Wordcamp Whistler entry. Oh, here I am; wow, even I am impressed my self-promotional instincts outrank my instinct for sleep right now.

and another thing…

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Married To The Sea

For fans of flamewars, of which there is rumoured to be an overrepresentation around these parts although who knows, eh? the following transcripts, taken verbatim from the Twitter accounts of your fine blog hostess, mineownself, and John Berringer, will pay handsome dividends. Apologies for not threading them properly: I’m way lazy, yo. Some say these should be private messages, but since when have I ever been accused of an overabundance of … what’s the word … discretion?

For those of you who, quite sensibly, find you have quite a sufficiency of drama in your own lives without bothering your head about anybody else’s, you may click here for a random, and almost 62% likely to be aggro-free, post from the past.

And now, the transcript of raincoaster, in reverse chronological order (you might wish to read from the bottom up). At a certain point I just closed Twitter and went off and did my work; you can tell virtually the exact moment if you read his stream. His (considerably more amusing) stream is just below mine:

Continue reading →

who’s that girl?

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A certain mysterious someone at Lamecamp Vancouver last week at the Cambie Pub. Who could it be? Whoever it is, they’ve got fabulous taste in Twitter reading material!

who's that girl?

Lamely shot on medium format, scanned at ridicioulsy low resolution after pushing the film by a stop because I lamely forgot my faster speed film.