Woah. More Canadian soldiers will be in Vancouver in 2010 to protect the Games than there currently are deployed in Afghanistan.

Pot smokers rejoice as Google Earth turns downtown Vancouver into a three dimensional waste of time.

Speaking of weed, Barack Obama’s half-bro was just busted for possession and resisting arrest in Kenya. This is just weird. Outside the muslim nations of Africa, marijuana use (appropriately called Bhang in Kenya) is not something people regularly get busted for. In my travels, it seemed more integrated and accepted into daily life in east and southern Africa than it was in my native BC. It reeks of a local police chief wanting his Fifteen Minutes, which, by way of the morning headlines from every new organisation around the world, he seems to be getting. Isn’t that more criminal than a dime bag? Of course he resisted…

Poor Porsche. What will wealthy 55 year old penises drive if they go under?

Make that three: in 2009, only seniors have been murdered in Vancouver (UPDATE: not anymore – two twenty-somethings stabbed and killed).

So much for artistic freedom on election day: A shoe sculpture dedicated to the dude who chucked his at George Bush’s head (and erected, rather poetically, on the grounds of an orphanage) has been dismantled in Iraq.

A HazMat team entertains downtown Vancouver (reading the Facebook updates of several friends trapped in their offices by the ordeal was hilarious – who knew the threat of terror could amuse?).

Former Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan thinks our financial concerns about the Games are unfounded. “Are the taxpayers at risk?” he rhetorically asks in the Tyee. “Absolutely not.”

Explaining the pleasures of surfing. Not so easy.

There’s a big deal international salmon conservation conference going down at the Fairmont Waterfront this week, with David Suzuki rocking the keynote. A search for irony was thwarted when the hotel’s restaurant joined Oceanwise. Damn.

Attack of the local Facebook geeks. Someone alert their parents and save commuters from the coming grief.

Who doesn’t love a good volcano story?

WTF? Paul McCartney to headline Coachella.

How Gmail destroyed Outlook.

The legal branding of the US Presidency begins. Smart. If they slapped a 15 cent royalty on every Obama t-shirt made, the US could save the world from insolvency.

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Andrew Morrison is a west coast boy who studied history and classics at the Universities of Cape Town and Toronto after an adolescence spent riding skateboards and working in restaurants. He is the editor of Scout Magazine, the weekly food and restaurant columnist for the Westender newspaper, and a contributor to Vancouver and Western Living magazines.

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