Category Archives: Vancouver

have they tried Craigslist?

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The Canadian navy has once again demonstrated beyond all doubt that, for Canada, this whole "blowing people up" thing is just really, like, not our thing.

They lost a torpedo. Check out the honest-to-god lead:

Damn the torpedo: navy loses practice weapon off British Columbia coast

Beachcombers in British Columbia take note: the navy has lost an expensive practice torpedo that may wash up on shore somewhere.

Supah. I should head over there right away. If they don't offer a decent reward, I can always use a new torpedo. Or, this being the Canadian navy we're talking about, an obsolete torpedo. Think of it as the Gremlin hatchback of torpedos.

The frigate spent three hours in vain looking for the errant object, known as a "hottorp" for Honeywell Operational Training Torpedo, the name given by the original manufacturer.

"All firing conditions were met and torpedo launched successfully, but did not resurface," says a censored report on the incident, obtained under the Access to Information Act.

"The hottorp may rise to the surface . . . and eventually wash ashore. . . . (Request) that local authorities be notified in case the torpedo surfaces at a later time."

"It hasn't popped up yet," Cmdr. Rod Hughes said in an interview from Esquimalt, B.C.

"We think it's sitting on the bottom out there. We're actually going to go back and look for it this summer. We'll probably recover it."

It is, by the way, somewhere around the mouth of one of the busiest harbours on the West Coast. What the hell, don't they call Victoria "God's Waiting Room?" And who ever minded having a shorter stay in a waiting room, eh?

as the world turns…without me *sob*

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I hate being sick. All the interesting shit in the world happens when I'm home, sick.

Proof: behold who Raj ran into on the last Vancouver Martini Tour. As for me, I was home in bed developing an intimate acquaintence with the Norwalk Virus.

Henry Fucking Rollins

Henry looks poleaxed in all probability because he knows I could not be there with him. Yeah, that's it.

Raj: Hey, would you kindly spit on my head?

Henry: What?

Lost Weekday

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Peteyboy, what are we going to do with you?

Well it's good to know that raincoaster wasn't the only one going a little wild on Tuesday.

The Shebeen Club benefit was a great time; Al Mader is a hoot and a great and generous performer, the food was excellent and plentiful, the help shushed the drunken Celts downstairs and kept the beverages flowing. Still, $17.50 is not much to show for a fundraiser, it must be said.

And it was said, repeatedly, by me as I went out afterwards to tire out my guilty conscience by taking it for a walk. I got a call from some friends who hadn't been able to make it, to meet them at Whineo's, a new bar on the Granville strip and, not being one to turn down free drinks, I did not, so over I went.

Whineo's

One Negroni and one Dirty L Martini were quickly added to my Shebeen-based glass of Merlot and pint of Strongbow. The bartender congratulated me on ordering the very first Negroni of the establishment, which wasn't really that much of an accomplishment as the place had only been open two days. Still.

Gotta luv a bar with good drinks and a Scooby Doo room.

Somewhere between the second and third olive of the Dirty L, Nina gets a brilliant idea to cheer me up and get me to stop diluting good gin with salty tears: she hands me twenty bucks for the TPaul benefit. Then, with pure evil genius, she turns to Raj and stares at him pointedly in a if you ever want to have sex with me again sort of way and Raj hands over a twenty as well.

Then we head back to the car. We do not get to the car, though. Not yet. We get out of the bar and take two steps down the sidewalk before Raj decides that Sanafir looks alarmingly dark. It looks, in fact, closed, it's so dark. Now, I think we all understand the help that dim lighting can give to certain chickens of the non-Spring-ular variety. Pam Anderson, ferinstance, should never go out in daylight at all, although she cannot appear in candlelight either, for fear parts of her will melt.

But this really was a bit beyond. On the upper floor there was some floodlighting of the ten-watt bulb with a three-dollar scarf thrown over it variety. On the ground floor there were no actual lights of any kind that I noticed. Sydney Smith, who said everything witty that Oscar and Dorothy didn't, was at a dinner party illuminated only by high wall sconces, and this was much like that. He found it was very much like being in Hell, actually, and said so to his diary, who told everyone. "Above there is a blaze of light, and below nothing but darkness and the gnashing of teeth."

Raj decided it was our duty as Vancouverites to check this out. I can now report that Sanafir, while dim, is not closed. If it appears to be closed when you walk by, rest assured it's just the management being discreet. Pound on the door till they let you in; they like that.

DOMinated

Sanafir count: three glasses of Dom Perignon, which we settled for after Nina put the kibosh on Raj's attempts to order the eight hundred dollar bottle of rose. Or the Krug I mentioned. We did get to look at it though. 

Krug. Ooooooooooooh.

Then we went to the car. That we could even find the car at this point is something of a miracle, but Raj was determined to get some work done and that meant ditching the chicks back on the East Side, so to the car we went. Nothing memorable about the drive except that the yellow line showed a surprising tendency to wander from one side of the car to the other and there was a skunk spotted. Hey, it's the Canadian version of "there goes Paris Hilton!"

Limerick JunctionNina and I decided that what we really needed at that point was a drink, so we staggered over to Limerick, which is the only bar on the Downtown EastSide I will go into after midnight. After attempting to work and realizing he was better off drinking (who among us has not had that moment of pure insight, eh?) Raj joined us. Limerick count: two pints of Strongbow and a pepperoni stick and everything would have been fine if, with a half-pint left in my glass, the bartender hadn't told us we had five minutes to drink up and leave.

Now, I'm a writer. So it goes against every fibre of my being to leave behind a drink that someone else has paid for. So I looked at the half-pint of Strongbow and vowed inwardly that I would do it justice in the remaining three hundred seconds of bar time.

That's really all I remember.

Limerick...a typical Tuesday

Overheard in Chinatown

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A four-year-old girl trying to teach her very Cantonese grandmother some crucial English phrases. There's nothing quite so Vancouver as the following exchange:

Toddler: "Okay Grandma, say this."

Grandmother, hesitantly: "O-kay" 

Toddler: "I need a coffee!"

Grandmother: "I nee a coffee!"

Toddler: "I seriously need a coffee!"

Grandmother: "I seri-uly nee a coffee!"

That kid knows this city like the back of her hand. Fuck "Call the police" or "Where is the ladies' room," she's got her Vancouver priorities straight. 

The Ovaltine Cafe: the Eavesdropping Part

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Ovaltine

 Wednesday, September 25, 2002

 

Let me preface today's entry with the warning: never, ever, no matter how good the idea seems at the time, put your computer in your bedroom. I saw the sunrise this morning before I got to sleep, and checked email before getting out of bed today.

 

And now back to our regularly scheduled writing…

 

Good service, good food, great sleazy and desperate atmosphere, and absolutely outstanding eavesdropping. Yup, that's the Ovaltine. What more could you ask for except that they'd put a few more fries on the plate? And I would ask that, as if it would do me any good.

 

Once I was sitting there in a booth, not my accustomed booth, as that one was occupied; I may say it was beyond its safe capacity and was in fact dangerously overloaded, like a freight elevator with a pod of orcas in it. Yes, that's the metaphor, for sure.

 

They were all mightly fine looking fellows, and healthy, too, not a skinny or craggy junkie among them, so I immediately assumed they were mid-level dealers. Turns out I was wrong.

 

Twelve eyes gave me a very critical look when I came in, and an even more critical one when I sat down directly across the aisle, but I don't take crap from any dealers, however buff. Besides, they were, to a man, wearing cheap plaid shirts and jeans. I mean really; who takes attitude from a lumberjack, at least if he doesn't have the saw right handy? So there they were, in my booth, the six of them, all fit, all in their twenties or early thirties, all with nice short haircuts, the kind your mother likes to see on your boyfriend, white as Wonderbread, and all in plaidrags; it was like a uniform or something. Or something…

 

And they were all leaning in, listening very intently as one of them whispered into a cellphone:

 

"He's right outside. Is he smoking up? Well, walk by him and smell it…
Can you get him to sell you some?
Well then go inside! I don't know, make something up!"

 

A stakeout. Cool.

 

At this point one of the undercovers squirmed around in his seat and started filming with a camcorder, focusing on the Savoy Hotel across the street. Must be a pretty good lens to film anything useful through a dirty window and across six lanes, but what do I know? I was keeping my head down and pretending to be mesmerized by my fries, a difficult assignment indeed, given that my serving only contained about twelve fries to begin with. Even stretching it out, I was eventually going to run out of reasons to stay in the booth. It was kind of challenging: every time the cops did something interesting, like whip out a cellphone or a GPS or a camcorder, they'd swivel their heads in unison, like some six-headed monster, and stare at me a long moment. I would look at my fries, dum-de-dum, dum-de-dum, just look at them fries! Sure are fried up real good. Then they would go ahead and do whatever it was they were going to do, resigning themselves either to my apparent stupidity or to the limitations of peripheral vision. But I have very good peripheral vision.

 

After about six of these cellphone confabs, GPS trackings, surreptitious filmings, and after they saw me order a bonus round of fries so I could hang around longer, they gave up and just let it all hang out, popping right out of the booth to stand in the aisle for a better camera angle, or walking to the back room for better reception. One went to the men's room, but I think he was just going for the regular reason. Don't know what he saw there, but he came back scared. Another guy was going to go and he stopped him.

 

"Believe me, you want to hold it. You really want to hold it."

 

About ten minutes later they got a call on the cell (yes, it had a cute ring, I think it was Beethoven's Ninth, though O Canada would have been an appropriate choice, or maybe something from the musical ride…wait, don't they use Beethoven on the musical ride…so there you go) and their leader, Grey Plaid Shirt Boy, actually used the words, "Let's roll!" and they did.

 

If I'd had my bill I'd have rolled right on out with them, but I had to hang behind and pay. Damn!