Category Archives: Vancouver

daylight reveals Downtown EastSide shock/horror!

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Well, for some of us anyway.

It’s remarkable what you can get accomplished when:

  1. you wake up at 8am
  2. WordPress won’t let you post because of server issues

I found the paperwork the government required of me, straightened my living room (somewhat), recycled several large sacks of old newspapers and flyers, stopped by the Downtown EastSide Women’s Centre, read the Bad Date Sheet (I meant to swipe one to post on the blog; apparently some fat white 30-something is kidnapping and robbing hookers and dumping them in godforsaken Cloverdale several times a week; now that the news is out, all 300-pounder suburbanites can kiss their chances of a cheap BJ goodbye), swung by the Salty Tongue for a yummy sammich and my free (loyalty programs rule!) mocha, full-fat, damn the torpedos, filed my taxes, made it to the government office on time and got that out of the way smoothly, thanks to finally having found said paperwork, dropped the taxes off at the tax office, picked up my free facial mask at Lush (thanks to the goody bag at the Rare dinner), snagged a free kolachy from the Kolachy Shop, also due to goody bag at said Rare dinner, grabbed some veggies for dinner from Sunrise Market, and attempted to take a look at the new Costco in the hood, although I was turned back at the door, as apparently  you cannot browse in Costco unless you’re a member. I tell you, I have no problem getting into the Vancouver Club or Shine, but ain’t nobody getting past the door bitch at Costco without their little token of membership.

Yep, without question this was the most productive day I’ve had in a very long time.

Hella boring for the blog, though.

save the endangered tree octopus

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Cascadia Evening Post, totally straight up and honest. Sriusly.

From my earliest childhood to my brief spell as a humble Greenpeace canvasser, I have always been acutely sensitive to the plight of endangered species, and never moreso than now that I live in one of the last great rainforests of the world.

As we hurtle ever faster towards our inevitable sterile, Logan’s Run inspired future, we shed species at a rate of approximately one every 20 minutes. Please don’t let the untamed beauty that is the Pacific Tree Octopus be lost; do not let it go the way of the dodo and the snow leopard.

But together we can work to maintain the wild herds of this noble creature. Hunted nearly to extinction for its incomparable beauty, its fate need not be sealed; indeed, it is possible that, with adequate planning and habitat preservation, we could learn to coexist with this most iconic of Cascadian cephalofauna.

Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus has the full story.

Tree Octopus RibbonShow people that you support the cause of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus by placing a Tentacle Ribbon or badge, along with a link to this page, on your website or weblog so that they can learn more. Together, we have the power to build a grass-roots campaign to save the Tree Octopus!

Why It’s Endangered

Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, we feel that it should be added since its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch. What few that make it to the Canal are further hampered in their reproduction by the growing problem of pollution from farming and residential run-off. Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory.

The possibility of Pacific Northwest tree octopus extinction is not an unwarranted fear. Other tree octopus species — including the Douglas octopus and the red-ringed madrona sucker — were once abundant throughout the Cascadia region, but have since gone extinct because of threats similar to those faced by paxarbolis, as well as overharvesting by the now-illegal tree octopus trade.

The history of the tree octopus trade is a sad one. Their voracious appetite for bird plumes having exhausted all the worthy species of that family, the fashionistas moved on to cephalopodic accoutrements during the early 20th Century. Tree octopuses became prized by the fashion industry as ornamental decorations for hats, leading greedy trappers to wipe out whole populations to feed the vanity of the fashionable rich. While fortunately this practice has been outlawed, its effects still reverberate today as these millinery deprivations brought tree octopus numbers below the critical point where even minor environmental change could cause disaster.

Sirens

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from the Archive

Sirens sometimes and screams, always. Warbling squalls of screams, gusts of them, scream fronts, the ambiguous kind that could mean something very good or something very bad. When it’s men screaming it’s that much more intense, whatever else it is. The worst thing is, you can’t see a thing. There’s nothing there, not by the time you get your courage up and your shoes out of the hall closet. Fifteen syringes between the corner and the first driveway, piles of torn bread scattered across the grass like abandoned snowdrifts, and a plastic bag skydancing in the warm exhaust from a cop car as it rolls down the alleyway. The ghosts look at you funny, and the buildings seem to sigh and close their eyes in exhaustion. And there is no-one there.

Then the screaming starts again, just a little way over, and by the time you get there, there is nothing. It could be aliens trying to abduct Downtown EastSiders, using the sound like a turkey call; that would explain the lack of…well…any thing. They’ve all been beamed up. But then wouldn’t there be fewer from day to day? And there are more, or at least plenty, thank you very much. Maybe they put them back after the anal probe; I can see why they scream.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Astoria now sells hard liquor. Junkies are usually nice and quiet, just sort of slumped there, but booze makes you publicly loud; check out any Earl’s after nine at night, or just take a walk around Yaletown. It’s good for a laugh; they say all the same things, just really, really loudly. “Bob, how was London? Great, great. Did you recover your investment there? Great, great.” Good for Bob, you think. And who the hell is Bob.

Maybe the screaming is related to the new supersupply of crystal meth. This is the stuff OJ used to take; not sure if he can afford it now. In Asia it’s called Yah Bah and the clubkids get whacked on it and rumble. It’s infamous for the violence it causes, so maybe the screaming is a secondhand effect.

The other day a 74-year-old man stabbed a middle-aged man to death over an old debt. They were both in line at the soup kitchen, just around the corner from my house. There were probably a hundred witnesses, on which there were probably 175 outstanding warrants.

Sometimes I feel like screaming myself.

cold front

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from the Archive

What is up I do not know, but everyone around here is high as a kite and has been for days. Things are crazy, which is the default in the neighborhood, but now they are the kind of crazy that makes people freak out and gets them life behind bars, not the normal kind of crazy that gets them called “Napoleon” and has them wash their hands facing north-northeast on Tuesdays.

The sidewalks are fairly quiet, except the drug market outside Carnegie, but the alleys have never seen such levels of activity (wouldn’t call it “life”). Quite a picture it makes, with the city gardeners watering the brightly flowered hanging baskets while in the background some grease-streaked Charles Manson lets off a fire extinguisher that he stole from a hotel so he can sell it to the pawn shop out front. Vast clouds of white powder tumble into the air past windmill-armed beggars spinning the haze into tornadoes while in the forground a couple of junkies jitterbug as their synapses snap and the sunlight refracts into a million rainbows as the pansies and petunias are carefully sprinkled and tended. Some wild-eyed guy comes tearing down the street the wrong way, skateboarding a shopping cart, while behind him the cart’s last illegal owner sprints madly; this is the Downtown EastSide version of an SUV, and not to be let go lightly. He is fitter, but much less desperate than the thief, who is skating for his life as well as his cart. If he makes it to the old Indy track he’s home free.

I begin to think I’m staggering from a secondhand high, but it’s just that every single pedestrian coming toward me lurches from left to right to left in unison. It’s like the Rockettes performing a matinee in Hell. I get that disoriented feeling you get in a train when you are sitting still and the train next to you begins to move. Are they moving, are they standing still? Am I?

And down by the train tracks I cannot figure out **what’s** going on. I hear the chinga-chunga of a train motoring along the track but, though I have a clear view over the ten lanes of track, I cannot see a single car move. Maybe I’m hearing my own wheels. I stop. It continues, chunga-chunga-chunga and the immobile boxcars look at me strangely. They have inscrutable markings, from OCEAN JINGO LIMITED and from Oaph the tagger. Mene, mene, tekel upharsin. I start skating again. The sound continues, pacing me; where the hell is it coming from? After awhile the slope evens out and I see that all along I have been paced by flats, an enormous string of them, so long that the engine is out of sight; at three feet in height, they were hiding below the angle of the slope. An entire train, hiding and following me and driving me crazy. No wonder the other trains looked at me funny.

Willy Pickton had a point?

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mmmmmm-mm good!

Perhaps you’re familiar with the tale of Willy Pickton, the Port Coquitlam pig farmer who picked up and murdered several dozen women from Vancouver’s Downtown EastSide. Perhaps you’ll even recall that I went for coffee with the fellow once and lived to tell the tale.

After he’d killed his victims, he took souvenir parts and the rest he put through the wood chipper, alternately feeding the product to his pigs or packaging it with ground pork and sending it to market as sausage meat. A friend of mine made a quarter of a million dollars from the pork marketing board, who hired him to get the price back up (it had fallen by half).

According to the Japanese sommelier robot, we don’t taste like chicken. We taste like bacon. Or prosciutto.

Well as everyone knows, all journalists are hams.

…when some smart aleck reporter placed his hand in the robot’s omnivorous clanking jaw, he was identified as bacon. A cameraman then tried and was identified as prosciutto.

Absolutely horrifying. Like cows, once robots taste blood, their hunger for human flesh can never be satiated. Japanese unveil robot wine steward [South Coast Today]