I once witnessed more ardent emotions between men at an Elks’ Rally in Pasadena
than they could ever have felt for the type of woman available to an Elk.
Anita Loos
Category Archives: Lush Life
a writer’s life: it’s not all skittles and beer
Sometimes it’s vengeful dames and whiskey sours. Welcome to my world:
Stolen from Gawker, which is quite the Kids in the Hall fanclub this weekend.
PS: Kids in the Hall were formed in 1984. Oh, GOD I’m old.
Insite Court Challenge
Community Groups take Federal Government to Court over Safe Injection Site
Sunday, April 27, 2007
On Monday, April 28, Pivot Legal Society director John Conroy will be representing the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users in a 10-day trial challenging the Federal Minister of Health’s ability to close Insite, the safe injection site in Vancouver.
Joe Arvey, representing the Portland Hotel Society which manages the site, will also be testing the federal government’s power to close Insite.
Where: B.C. Supreme Courthouse
When: Monday, April 28, 10am
Duration: 10 days
Case name: VANDU v. AG Canada and Minister of Health; PHS Community Services Society et al v. AG Canada
Presiding Judge: Judge Pitfield
It has been more than four years since Insite, the first supervised injection site in North America, opened with the goal of increasing access to drug treatment, reducing street disorder, and preventing overdose deaths and disease transmission among Vancouver’s drug user population. Numerous scientific studies in medical journals such as the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have shown the effectiveness of the site in meeting those objectives. The Federal Government’s select advisory committee on Insite also published a report two weeks ago documenting the success of the site.
Despite the medical evidence, the Federal Minister of Health has refused to grant a permanent exemption to Section 56 of the Narcotics Control Act for Insite, which allows the injection of drugs on the facilities. Instead, the Minister has granted to two temporary extensions to the exemption. The most recent exemption is due to expire on June 30, 2008. After that, the future of Insite is uncertain.
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About Pivot Legal Society
Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins. We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such as opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law.
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Mass Ejaculations!!!
We at the ol’ raincoaster blog did not just fall off the squid trawler, ya know. No indeed, we were not hatched yesterday nor even the day before and are perfectly well aware of the mass moist madness that erupts when you get groups of excited, vigorous young people together in a consequence-free and water-and-stain-resistant environment stocked with bottled beverages.
Behold the world’s largest Mentos and Diet Coke experiment:
Honestly, it looks like an orgy at Hogwarts to me. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all!
There’s not a raging snotload of things to do in Belgium, if you don’t rustle mussels or brew beer for a living, so these enthusiastic, yet two-years-behind-the-meme students decided to go for mass quantities, rather than attempt to duplicate the balletic elegance of the original experiment. For this monumental achievement, they gathered in historic (and, presumably, easily hosed down) Ladeuzeplein Square in Leuven, Belgium. Note please, that Coke does not work as well and regardless of what the Torygraph article linked to above tells you, it must be Diet Coke.
Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz were the famed mad scientists whose hypnotic Aesthetic of the Absurd video, covered extensively in this blog and millions of others, set the tone for memes to come, from the inexorable rise of lolcats up to and including Anonymous‘s current campaign against Scientology.
Not-Fleshed-Out-Yet-Really-Quite-Inescapable Conclusion: The dominant vernacular of civil engagement today defines itself directly against the current structure and forms of terrorism and is absurd in every sense, self-aware, positive in tone and gesture, meta-(not post-)intellectual, and a helluva lot of fun.
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Quote o’ the Day: Toby Young on Fame
It’s rare indeed to find someone whose fascination with the phenomenon of fame exceeds my own storied obsession, but I have indeed located one such sick and deluded soul, and his name is Toby Young. And here is the smartest thing he has to say on the subject, shamelessly stolen from his book The Sound of No Hands Clapping
There are so many different varieties of fame these days we need to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe them. At the moment, the best we can do is to rank celebrities according to whether they’re A-list, B-list, etc. But even if we use every letter of the alphabet that still only gives us 26 different types. That’s surely not enough. Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Shouldn’t we have 47 words for celebrity?
Selah.
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raincoaster 