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It's enough to drive a man to drink, what's going on today - war and rumors of war, Rob Ford smashing the democratic process in Toronto, the rain that comes down so often in Metro Vancouver except when it doesn't. While I like to aim for what comes out of the microbreweries and the craft breweries, the fact is that the beer stores in downtown New Westminster don't exactly have a vast selection. Still, there are times when I go against the admonishment to drink good beer, times when I'm just looking for a six-pack of something to take the edge off. Most of the options I have over here are more or less unique to this end of the continent; I never saw so much as a discarded can of Olympia during all my time in Ontario.Olympia Beer has a long history in the Pacific Northwest, going back to the 1890s when it was first brewed in Tumwater, Washington - near Olympia, so perhaps hence the name. Despite regional popularity, the makers fell on hard times and were bought out thirty years ago, to the point that its main production point today is a SABMiller plant in California. The cans for sale in British Columbia claim to have been brewed by the "Oly Brewing Company" in Saskatoon, but I can't find any reference to this supposed brewery that isn't some other review. I wouldn't be very surprised if it was produced in the United States and just relabeled; certainly, the only French on this can is that which identifies it as "bière."That's enough of a history lesson, though - you can't drink history. You want to know how it is as a beer today, right? Well, the tagline for Olympia Beer is "it's the water," which I suspect derives from its use of water from artisanal wells back in the day. Today, though, "it's the water" is just plain honest; that's practically all that there is inside the can. It's the most accurate proof I've found yet of the "sex in a canoe" joke.
Remember to cut the plastic rings so turtles don't get their heads stuck in them and die!
Work has been progressing on Westminster Pier Park along the New Westminster waterfront all through the winter, although the signs up on the parkade still give the previous completion date of fall 2011. In the time I've been watching, it's gone from piles driven down into the riverbank to the floating park taking shape. Now it's dominated by the metal skeleton of Lytton Square, a modern replication of New Westminster's original nineteenth-century public market. Apparently once it's done it'll house concessions and a gathering space; once it's done, though, I won't be able to take any more pictures quite like this, either.
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In very rare and narrow circumstances, there's a certain advantage to ignorance. Every once in a while, we meet a roadblock in life that we feel like there's no choice but to climb, and only once we're on the other side do we find out just how damn dangerous it was to scuttle across. There are things that we would never do if we had a greater understanding of what it really meant in order to do it, things we do because they seem easy or convenient and the fact that we're playing the numbers every time we do it is hidden from our senses - like living in a seismic danger zone, for example, or on the flanks of a sleeping volcano. If people had known that, say, Mount Rainier was ready to blow its top, it's doubtful that cities would have been built where ancient lahars seared the earth.Things like this are understandable when it comes to the ground beneath our feet; it appears stable, and that appearance is deceiving. It's one thing to make achievements in ignorance when the natural danger not only looks safe, but has been that way for ten thousand years. It's another thing entirely to extend that ignorance to something new, and something human-made.That is, of course, if you consider the beings who write the bills that our parliaments and congresses foist on us to be human.
It could be that they are actually tricksy crows who have learned to hold pens in their beaks.
I'd never been down to Kits Beach before yesterday; Kitsilano is far enough from New West, and enough of a hassle to get to by transit, that I've only rarely headed down that way. The rain that had been dominating the morning let up in the early afternoon, and as the sky blazed through cracks in the cloud cover, people and their dogs went out to pound the sands of English Bay. It almost seems more honest with this level of cloud cover out over the ocean - a more honest Vancouver day.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
"Star Trek: When Planets Collide," author(s) unknown
Appeared in Gold Key's STAR TREK #6, December 1969"There are our space bogies--and still on collision course! Mr. Spock... what if they should hit...?""At their estimated point of contact, the results would be catastrophic, Scotty! The shock waves upon impact alone would pitch many of the Alpho planets out of orbit... to burn in space!"I know it should be obvious to everyone with even a whiff of familiarity with the subject matter, but it still bears repeating: if you're looking for actual science that makes sense, rather than buzzword particles invented by some writer because the plot needs to be resolved somehow and all that liquor isn't going to drink itself, you're not going to find it in Star Trek. While the franchise did act as a gateway for me and many others into the greater world of science fiction, the facile way in which it portrays scientific and physical phenomena can be stunting; it was only in the last couple of years that I began to understand and appreciate how spaceflight actually works.Compared to comic books, Star Trek flowed from the pen of Carl Sagan. This is particularly true when the comic books in question are Star Trek comic books. Beginning in the late 1960s, shortly after the cancellation of the original series and tapping into the groundswell of Star Trek fandom that arose with the show's syndication, Gold Key Comics published more than sixty issues of licensed Star Trek comics - and in those pages that hid behind covers made of photo collages that rarely had any relationship to the story within, Star Trek's casual disregard for scientific rigor collided with the completely out-there, ridiculous, anything-goes stuff that comics have been, and continue to be, known for. I mean, I've been told that the Flash's costume is made out of pure speed. Speed isn't even a thing.Nevertheless - Star Trek comics were made in the 1960s, and in part because they were crazy as hell they were, and remain, entertaining to some degree. Much of the rest of the entertainment value comes from the fact that they're so bad, they're good, in part because of the vast liberties taken by the comic writers and artists from Gene Roddenberry's source material. I mean, these are comics where the Enterprise is regularly depicted as a stereotypical rocketship with flame spewing from the warp nacelles, where Captain Kirk is given to exclamations like "great galloping galaxies" and "howling comets," and where the resolution of the very first story was of the Enterprise scouring a planet of life. Now that's the Starfleet way!
Those meteorites have punctured the bridge, and space air is leaking in! Goggles on, everyone! (Comic page TM & © 2008 CBS Studios. All rights reserved.)
At a high enough zoom, the camera lens distorts the true picture of reality. The SkyTrain tracks don't really have anything in common with a roller coaster where they descend into the short subway between New Westminster and Columbia, but when the camera's bringing things closer to the eye some things inevitably get lost in the translation.This photo was taken in March 2011 - it'd look fairly different now, if only because the cold metal skeleton of Plaza 88 around New West Station is a bit more than a skeleton now.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Devices look the way they do for a reason. Maybe tests showed that it was the most ergonomic design for the function, maybe the designer was inspired by old science fiction, or maybe the manufacturer's just taking the opportunity to push as many spare parts as possible out of the warehouse. The point is that in many cases, design and device aesthetics are of paramount importance - I mean, would iPhones be as popular if they were bricks of aluminum with rivets as thick as your thumb? The way a device looks is a common shorthand for how advanced it is - the sleek lines of a modern smartphone just look more advanced than 1980s car phones.Nevertheless, if you're building a coherent and believable world - no matter what medium you're using - that sensibility should still be there. Sure, the VISOR worn by Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation was modelled off a plastic barrette, but for most people it was likely far enough removed from its original source that it didn't trip people up; that it would cause a reaction of "damn, look at that guy's freaky future glasses" rather than "damn, that guy's wearing a woman's hair clip on his face."There can be times, though, where this fails - and when it fails spectacularly, that's where it becomes interesting to folks like me, in the same sense that a train derailment can be interesting. I ran across such an example in GURPS Ultra-Tech, a supplement for the GURPS roleplaying system written in 1989 and updated in 1991, which details speculative equipment for future campaigns from a decidedly 1980s lens - not that such a lens is unwelcome, even today. One device in particular never ceased to raise the question of "what the hell were they thinking," both in the context of the book itself and whatever future world that would think it was a good idea.Newscam: This is a rifle-sized and -shaped camera used by news teams (and surveillance crews). It is identical to the digital camera described above... it looks so much like a rifle that it is dangerous to use around hair-triggered counter-sniper teams; cameramen are advised to wear armor. (GURPS Ultra-Tech, pg. 31.)There are so many things wrong with this concept, I can't even begin to address them all.
"Don't be ridiculous, of course this isn't a firearm! Now just let me point it at your face for that hostile interview we were talking about."
There aren't many places in Toronto where you can forget that you're in the middle of Toronto. It's rather a different situation than what prevails in Metro Vancouver, where you can amble into the forests around Burnaby's Deer Lake or crunch into the preserved rainforest in Stanley Park or get off a bus in North Vancouver and find stargates and DHDs behind ancient trees in Lynn Canyon. In built-up Toronto, the only spots where the city gets held in abeyance are places like the thickly-forested Nordheimer Ravine, parts of the Humber Valley along the bicycle trail, and High Park. When it was first opened, High Park was on the absolute fringe of the city - by now, of course, the city has grown around it. I took this photo of a path leading out of it up to Bloor Street West back in 2008.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
You know, it sure is thoughtful of the Conservatives - now that they've got a majority in the House of Commons and can thus do whatever the hell they want thanks to the wonderfully broken system we call Westminster-style parliament - to keep giving us reasons why it was such a bad idea to elect them into power in the first place, because they don't have to face the electorate for another three years and by then most people will have forgotten.The latest was a zinger of a punch delivered by Vic Toews, the Minister of Public Safety - a position, incidentally, that immediately brings to mind Revolutionary France - in response to an opposition MP who attacked the Conservatives for overstepping their bounds with their latest controversial law, which would substantially increase the ability of the police to conduct potentially invasive investigations into Canadians' digital lives without first obtaining a warrant to do so. Michael Geist provides a good look into the implications of this bill - I encourage everyone to check it out."He can either stand with us," Toews said of his critic, "or with the child pornographers."
Just don't think about that for a minute - here's a picture of a bunny.
Back when I was growing up, the buses always looked the same - they were all GM New Look buses from the late 1950s, made famous by the one in Speed with the bomb in it. Fifteen years ago they were ubiquitous, but as new models came into service the aging Fishbowls were gradually pulled out of service. Barrie Transit made heavy use of them in the 1990s, and in Toronto they puttered on until 2011, when the last of them were retired from service.Back in 2008, I caught Toronto's bus #2250 waiting for the light to change at University and Gerrard. It's probably in a scrapheap now.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Remember to cut the plastic rings so turtles don't get their heads stuck in them and die!
