by Sean Orr | The Canucks are in the Stanley Cup and Douglas Coupland gets booed at the Waldorf. This is turning out to be one of the best years ever!
City’s fake policy hides disappearing housing at the Colonial and Seaview Hotels. So let me get this straight: they don’t count it as a loss of housing if the hotel goes upscale? If ever there was a time for the G-word, this is it.
Meanwhile in the West End… Broken elevator exhausts residents. Aww, that’s too bad.
Where does a Luongo go to get inspiration? Same place as the rest of us, the Seawall.
Here’s one way to extinguish Canucks fever: Canucks playoff run may cost Vancouver taxpayers $1 million. Where is the outrage, Maureen Bader of the Canadian Taxpayers Association?
Although I guess it’s not like they’re spending 500k running shrimp on treadmills. Instead we’re buying F-35s to fight a war that renders them obsolete from a defense company that can’t even protect itself from hackers.
Not The Onion headline of the day: Horse Herpes Forces Kids to Ride Sticks.
Cool new Tumblr: Vancouver Plays.
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That article on NSF research is just boneheaded. $500K to study shrimp running on treadmills? Yeah, because understanding how their metabolism works and how they respond to external stresses is hugely important both to our understanding of marine ecosystems and, as a particular example, the seafood industry. It’s easy for reporters to play “gotcha!” with science, but that’s only because they don’t know enough to understand what they’re reading about.
(As a scientist, that sort of thing pisses me off. One of the commenters on that story nailed it: it’s like reporting Pavlov’s work as training dogs to drool when bells are rung.)
And having read the article on Lockheed-Martin: it says they detected the attack and took countermeasures. That’s kind of the opposite of “can’t even protect itself”, isn’t it? I’m no fan of the F-35, but can we at least read articles before commenting on them?
Thanks. I admit I just heard that they got hacked on twitter so I just found a link. They didn’t lose data but they were still compromised. I mean besides making WMDs they also have all of our census info. I just wanted to take a jab at them for that.
I wasn’t really commenting on the shrimp thing, just that the yanks are all up in arms over that and if it happened here it would be similar but when things like The Olympics and The Canucks put a drain on taxpayers nobody says nothing….
The article on PHS losing the management contracts for seaview, colonial and flint is also misleading. They were only given those contracts fairly recently. Those buildings had been run privately and more expensive up until about a year ago, not sure what BC Housing was doing when they decided to temporarily fund those spots but they didn’t change very much (positively, at least) in the time that they were managed by PHS.
When you read the elevator-out article, did you get to the part that said the same building had a two-month outage last summer? Making the elderly use the stairs to go outside is funny, no?
perspective
I wasn’t there, but from every account I read, Coupland did not “get booed.”
And the fact that you celebrate or get excited that he might have?
Well that’s just mean. Give him a break, Vancouver! That’s no way to treat somebody from your hometown. Is it possible the video-stream-of-consciousness event was intended to demonstrate the absence of “You” from “Tube?!” On behalf of Doug fans around the world, who appreciate all his work, projects, experiments–keep it up, Doug! We love you–and we “get it.” X
Agree entirely re. the shrimp thing. It doesn’t matter how good/useful/important the research is; if some hack “journalist” can’t immediately see the point, it suddenly becomes a colossal waste of resources. Meanwhile cities continue to throw money at sports franchises based on logic that was debunked 15 years ago. As a scientist (and a sports fan) it’s frustrating as all hell.
I agree wholeheartedly with Annie and fail to comprehend your blissful attitude toward slamming, of all people, Douglas Coupland. Is this humour? In any regard, though I was unable to attend the event, I understand that it brought people together, evoked reflection on the antisocial nature of social media, and inspired conversation. Hmm…sounds to me like the *experiment* was a success.
Oh dear. Coupland, like the memes he nourishes, has become a characterization of himself. Clearly I am not attacking the man, but the myth. I’m sure Coupland himself would smirk at his status as a symbol of over-wrought, po-mo, self-aware drivel. Indeed it is more the archetype he has created for himself- that of a laid back, Westcoast, generation X-er, that contains within it, it’s own negation! The fact that Annie thinks I don’t “get it” is exactly why it is so easy and yes, funny, to make light of. Cloaked in an obsequious veil of conceptualism his art has become a series of sarcastic chachkas. That being said I think he’s a necessary component of Vancouver’s cultural make-up.
Also: Horse Herpes Forces Kids to Ride Stick