Category Archives: Vancouver

A Downtown EastSide Christmas

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Ho, ho, hotels all over the Downtown EastSide keep Christmas in their own unique ways. Unlike the Chinese restaurants that simply layer new tinsel over the old and leave the whole spangly mess up all year round, the hotels and flophouses, to be fair, do try to get into the spirit of things at the time, each in its own way.

The Patricia, flyer of the Red Ensign, bastion of respectability, old-fashioned refinement, microbrewed house beer, and sad old run-down gentlemen who still stand when a lady walks into the pub:

The Patricia, Ho, ho, ho!

 

The Drake, a somewhat different establishment:

The Drake and its hos.

A Very Shebeeny Christmas

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The Father Christmas letters 

For all those writers, publishers, editors, bloggers, and journalists out there. Forget the office party and come drink with The Shebeen Club tomorrow night at the Irish Heather!

We’ll be upstairs in the Reading Room this time, at the Irish Heather in Gastown, 217 Carrall Street in Gastown, from 7-9pm. No cover, order off the menu and enjoy the best damn gastropub in the West!

 

Twas the day before Tuesday, when all through downtown
The email went out inviting Shebeeners down
To the Heather on Tuesday the 19th: tomoz!
For a drink and a nosh and tales of Santa Claus.

 

We’ll have a fun evening, no lectures to hear,
From seven ’til nine, just a-drinking our beer!
With Lorraine with Grinch earrings and a Santa hat,
You can come as you are, or all dressed up in spats.

 

And down in the kitchen arises a bashing
The chef is meat grilling and potato mashing.
Order straight off the menu and pay what you nosh
Tear into the butter, and the whiskies quite posh.

 

“Now Writers! Now Students!
Now, Publishers many!
Come, Poets! Come, Bloggers!
Come, Booksellers, merry!
To the Reading Room of the Heather
At the top of the stairs!
Now party on! Party on!
Don’t put on airs!

 

We’ll read Chrismas stories, and tell our tall tales
So drop in for a bevvy; I’ll tell about the old jail.
The Heather was lockup in decades gone by
So come down, serve your time drinking Guinness and rye.

Operation Global Media Dominaton: the imperfect storm

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I think we all know what a 45-degree angle looks like. And we know what a slope, dropping down at 45 degrees looks like. Like fun skiing, like nasty winter driving, like…

the stats for my blog ever since the Internet went out at my house.

Oh, they’ll recover, I suppose. It’s just a wee titch annoying that once I’d (or rather, you’d) finally cranked the hits up to almost 2k a day, Mother Nature (just as much of a bitch as my biological mother, and quite possibly as big a bitch as my stepmother, although it must be admitted, somewhat less likely to sell off my family heirlooms to purchase dreadful antiques and very definitely less likely to stencil cows with gingham aprons all around the ceiling of any rooms; Mother Nature prefers her cows with all four hooves firmly on the ground, except when she likes to send them flying in windstorms, which brings us back to why I still have no internet and why Mother Nature is a bitch).

God hates blogs.

12 midnite invites you to colour outside the lines

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12 mindnight invites you to colour outside the lines!

saw this and thought of you: dried squid postcards

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Dried squid...what does it look like, eh?Say so much, without saying a word.

Living, as I do, in Chinatown, I have gotten used to cultural dissonance as my default mode of being. I’ve lived here for six years now and I still say to myself “Holy crapola, look at that dried squid! Craaaaazy shit! And those dried minnows…shiny!!!” Well to be fair, I don’t have cable; I’m starved for entertainment.

But for years I’ve walked past these piles, bins, and impromptu Cthalderesque mobiles of dried squid and thought I wonder if the post office would deliver one if I put a stamp and an address on it.

Now Pink Tentacle reports (via Japanprobe) a Japanese company has taken the guesswork out of the process; they are producing edible postcards made of dried squid.

 Residents of the coastal town of Susami in Wakayama prefecture love the sea and the post office so much that the town once installed a mailbox on the ocean floor for scuba divers. Now, further evidence of this powerful sea/mail love comes in the form of “Surumail” — edible postcards made from squid.

Produced by the Susami fishing cooperative, Surumail postcards consist of dried surume squid (Todarodes pacificus), the local seafood specialty. The squid jerky is flattened and vacuum-packed into the shape of a postcard, and an adhesive label is included for the postage, delivery address and a short message.

So, should you get an unspeakably oceanically-scented and fully-digestable Cthristmas Cthard from me this year, don’t be too surprised.

Surimail, y'all