Category Archives: Travel

The Strange Range Tweetup!

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The Gold Range from Celebrate Canada

The Gold Range from Celebrate Canada

Attention, Yellowknife! In particular those parts of Yellowknife with a vested interest in the survival (or otherwise) of the most infamous dive bar in the North! In furtherance of Week Five of my Infinite Week Plan, and because we don’t have much time left, we present: The inaugural Tweetup at the Range!

So, you may have heard (in fact, you almost certainly heard it, and well before me, in fact) that the future of the Strange Range is in doubt.

  1. It may cease to exist.
  2. It may get a moderate upgrade and a handout and stagger on as before.
  3. It make get a facelift and some lipo and run around trying to pass itself off as a thirtysomething hookah lounge. God only knows, really. Once they start with a nip and tuck, there’s no telling where they’ll end up.

Sooooo, I got to thinking. I’ve only been there once, but it seems to me that Yellowknife without a dive bar (and a famous one at that: it has a Wikipedia page! Can the same be said of any of the people wanting to close it down?) isn’t quite as…Yellowknifey, if you know what I mean. When Devin and the others from Kellett took me there in the Springtime, whispering blood-curdling warnings all the way, the tense atmosphere lasted exactly long enough for my eyes to focus in the gloaming and me to realize it was WAY UPSCALE from what I was used to on the Downtown Eastside. Not even any glass shard embedded on the tables!

And then an Elder walked over and said, “I just want to thank you young people for coming in. It’s good to see you here” and that was it, I melted. And then I told everybody about the time I went for coffee with Willy Pickton, just to restore the goosebump factor.

Which is neither here nor there. So here:

Who? You, me, and whoever else dares!

What? A Tweetup: meaning a casual gathering around a loose purpose, in this case to discuss/experience the Strange Range for what might be the last time. Tweetups are called via social media, that’s where they get their name, but you don’t have to be geeky to attend. Pay your own bill, order what you like. What, you think I’m your liver doctor?

When? 6pm Thursday, August 18th, 2011.

Where? The Gold Range Tavern. Don’t worry, you’ll recognize me. I’ll be the chubby, short blonde one with the black laptop with the sticker that says “SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER“.

Why? To tell stories, to hear stories, to become part of the legend of the Strange Range before it’s too late.

Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil.

For I’m the meanest Sonofabitch in the Valley.

The Strange Range EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

The Strange Range EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

Scotch that!

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It's bad news when the Bartender cries

It's bad news when the Bartender cries

So yesterday I decided I’d been good (god knows why I decided that, but I can be somewhat arbitrary at times) and deserved a treat, and so I took myself to the local filling station, an agreeably-but-not-intimidatingly casual place named after a species of plant which did not, in fact, exist on the premises.

Unless it was hiding, and after what happened, who could blame it?

The waitress was attentive, and sweet, and barely old enough to be out that late on a school night. She asked me what I would like to drink, and I thought about what not-too-exotic-but-still-tasty items might be available in the subarctic regions and said, “Do you have Johnny Walker Black?”

She looked at me with alarm.

“Rum?” she asked.

“…Scotch,” I replied, probably just as startled as she had been. She’d apparently never heard of this exotic tipple. I might as well have asked for a Connecticut Bullfrog, Andover style.

She toddled off to whisper to the bartender. No doubt she thought it was something that was kept under the bar, in case of the po-po.

She came back smiling, and saying Yes, Yes, we have this ‘Johnny Walker Black’ stuff! or words to that effect. So I ordered a double.

“With Pepsi?”

And so concludes our Slice of Life in the Knife for this evening. The following I post here because it is perhaps the finest ten minutes of a bartending god as you will ever witness in your entire life, unless you buy the film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and watch the whole thing repeatedly, as is your right. Or would be, if you hadn’t downloaded the damn thing from Bittorrent, eh?

and, for the complete opposite, here:

Did that guy actually get paid for this?

(via Whisky2.0)

Pat’s Bay Wildlife Slideshow

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Parental Eagle is not so much angry as disappointed in you

Parental Eagle is not so much angry as disappointed in you

Time to take a trip in the wayback machine, as well as the puddle jumper! These are some shots I took in June at Pat’s Bay on Vancouver Island, more formally known as Patricia Bay, which is doubtless how it was introduced to the Royals. It is, by the way, a $40 cab ride from downtown Victoria, although thanks to faithful charioteer WestcoastDave on Twitter, I didn’t have to pay.

Ah, social media, you spoil me.

I didn’t even have to pay for the plane ride home on Saltspring Air, thanks to the organizers of Social Media Camp! Since I grew up in planes, I was looking forward to this flight: a true puddle-jump from Pat Bay to one of the Gulf Islands, and then to Coal Harbour in Vancouver, from which I could and did walk home. Nothing like living right downtown! Not only that, but they promised me the handsome ex-Olympian who was also the most polite pilot in Canada. Our pilot was indeed handsome and polite, but as to Olympian histories, well, I thought it was too personal a question to ask. And possibly painful. I mean, what if the answer was, “No, actually my bobsled team was knocked out in the semi-finals and my whole life since then has been a slow, downward spiral, like some tragicomic Bruce Springsteen song.”

Incidentally, the plane we flew in was a 1956 DeHavilland Beaver, a plane of which Canuckistan can be justly proud. I’m thinking Hummingbird604‘s flight home must be the first and only time he spent that long in a beaver.

But there are some good reasons to get out of The Big Smoke occasionally. I think I caught most of them in these pictures.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Yellowknife Commute at Rush Hour

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Yeah, so this is what it looks like when you walk downtown at rush hour from Buttfuck Nowhere, AKA New Newfoundland, out by the Walmart.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Not too bad, eh? Well, except for Arkham Asylum up on the hill there, overlooking the Plateau of Leng and the escaped loon in the foreground. Apparently we’re also not far from Kadath in the Cold Waste; Sarah Palin can see it from her house.

Particularly after the second mushroom.

Note also that the Warm Up Station closes when it gets really cold. I see bureaucrats the world over have the same logical handicaps.

An Explanation!

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Well, this certainly accounts for what just happened to me.

http://twitter.com/#!/forgetful_man/statuses/98247762377838594