Smoke Break #956: Cool Animation Of How Scientists Measure The Vastness Of Space

Narration and space nerditude by the lovely and talented Dr. Olivia Johnson. Cool (via). Of course Flyer’s goalie Ilya Brygalov still does a better job.

TAKE ANOTHER BREAK

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Snakeheads Tearing Apart Our City & Hunting Rats On The DTES

by Sean Orr | Burnaby lagoon snakehead caught on tape again. If you think about it, this is the perfect metaphor for Vancouver. There is an invasive species pushing out a native species, only the snakeheads are these mouth-breathing, hyper-sexualized creatures that can sometimes move across land (or bridges and tunnels). Now imagine fishing and catching a crowd of Axed-out roid freaks wearing Parasuco jeans and Snakehead Gym hoodies!

Also, I really don’t think that we are taking this Scottish Broom threat seriously at all. They’re as miserable as their Pictish namesake. They’ll make you a Presbyterian and your life will forever be like Breaking the Waves.

By Jove, the jock-cum-journalist gets it right! Cities deserve bigger share of tax dollars. This is what I was saying just the other day to Jordan Bateman. The cities take most of the province’s most marginalised people. And then we have to pay when the suburbs destroy our city. Is anti-urban rhetoric like Bateman’s just thinly-veiled anti-intellectualism?

Oh, plus we can’t even afford to transport ourselves. TransLink property sell-off plan startles region’s mayors. Weird. It turns out that by hitching transit to gas funding you actually lose money when people start using it. It’s like the infamous Factory Records deal with Happy Mondays that saw the company lose money with every record sold.

Shaking in their boots: Prospect of ‘free-enterprise coalition’ scales back B.C. NDP’s lead. Keep dreaming, you crazy dreamers. You think all those fired BC Libs are going to be allowed back in? They hate each other more than they hate the NDP! Hell, the NDP hates itself (or least they should) more than the two combined.

Speaking of hate: Vision’s ideology makes them ‘mean,’ ‘divisive’. Vision’s vision is way too Vision-y.

B.C. needs more immigrants to address looming labour shortage: task force. Oh, the south of the Fraser is not gonna like the sound of that.

Rat count underway on DTES. The number of ratgoofs, however, remains undetermined.

The following is actually an opinion piece from The Courier: From Napoleon to 20-sided dice.

Smoke Break #955: Dr. Michio Kaku On The Dark Side Of Modern & Future Technologies

So it turns out that our kids will be able to create new life forms from their phones and play cooties with home laser-enriched uranium in the not so distant future. Thanks, Dr. Kaku. You have a great day, too (via).

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Pepper-Flavoured Beers And Its No Longer Safe To Do Anything

by Sean Orr | How to make a riot bigger: Video shows Montreal police pepper spraying bar patrons during protest melee. Ain’t nobody better be fucking with my pint of Le Fin Du Monde, yo.

Tweet of the day c/o Stephen Taylor: “Why does violence only ever emerge during leftwing demonstrations? They own the mantle of domestic violent political extremism”. Because nobody ever brought a gun to a Tea Party demo.

Harpoon Stephen: Killer whale expert out of work as feds cut ocean-pollution monitoring positions. Maybe this alone will be the single issue that sinks Harper (aka Captain Ahab).

A theme developing: Cuts at Environment Canada mean fewer left to clean up oil-spill mess. If your irony-metre just went through the roof, you are not alone.

Robyn Urback on shocking anti-male hatred on the SFU campus. More shocking than the real violence they are talking about?

We Built This City on Boosterism: 100 Years of complaining.

That is not a bubble. This is a bubble. Actually, they’re both bubbles, so don’t just take City Caucasian’s word for it. Check in with Bob “Everything Is Going To Be Alright” Rennie, too.

First World Problems: High-speed Internet remains a fantasy for many Canadians. I wanted to read that article, but the page took forever to load.

Gloria Mackarenko practicing for Bard on the Beach: “The boyfriend. Upset about the break-up. He loaded his van with weapons and explosives and burst into her home. It happened. Last evening. In Kamloops.”

Deadly weekend: a scuba diver dies, a woman dead after falling off a Hornby Island cliff, and a Canadian woman dies on Mount Everest in the notorious ‘death zone’. I think the message is clear. Stop doing stuff.

Painting: “Emperor Haute Couture” by Margaret Sutherland.

Foreign Intelligence Briefing #404: The Cool Thing We Missed About The Annular Eclipse

(via) Take a moment and sympathize with all the local science geeks who had yesterday’s shit weather kick them in the shins with steel-toed meanie boots. Why you so rain, clouds?

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Luongo And Smoking Weed With Tourists Out By The Steam Clock

by Sean Orr | An elected Senate would ruin B.C., so Harper should have no problem ram-rodding it through then. That’s why I vote Loyalist every time. Down with the Whigs! Long live King George!

Another strange DTES smear piece from The Courier: Vancouver housing provider operates brothels in the Downtown Eastside. What gives? This on the heels of the study that proved sex workers were safer with indoor work spaces. No mention of that in the article, of course. Go figure.

Related: Kitsilano tops the list of 10 cheating neighbourhoods in Vancouver. I love that the byline is by “Staff Writer”. Nobody in the newsroom wanted to put their name to this piece of garbage.

Why Translink is Bankrupt: Metro Vancouver’s Transit Police rack up huge overtime bills. Handing out tickets that no one ever pays?Brilliant. And then something like this happens.

Everything’s Gone Green: V-Pole. A Wi-Fi, Electric Vehicle Charging Lamp Post of the Future. It will also read selective Douglas Coupland quotes like “TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public”.

Who cares if it helps the city? The real question is if it’s good for business: City expands summer VIVA Vancouver plan to restrict vehicle traffic in urban areas. Stick a couple of V-Poles in there and you got yourselves a rockin’ street party!

Unfortunately relevant: Should stratas consider non-smoking bylaws? Not unless you want me smoking, like, 25 joints a day in front of the steam clock. I mean, I’m not exactly pro-Tourism Vancouver, but I’m sure they’d rather I kept the huge plumes of marijuana smoke inside my super fancy Gastown loft (that my parents bought for me).

Cool, and only about 10 years late: Vancouver activists dumpster dine to save the planet. Holy shit this is priceless: “A group of young women who call themselves ‘freegans’ search dumpsters for edible food in the Metro area. They are not homeless or poor, but choose to scavenge their meals this way”. Great, now the Vancouver Sun is hiring writers fresh from the sixth grade.

Why are all the best writers sports-writers? “The Tampa Bay Lightning would control the (media) outlets allowed to have access to Roberto Luongo. Right now, the two publications that seem to have the inside track are: Italian Goaltender Weekly and The Luongo Family Christmas Newsletter. Also, Skymall has submitted a questionnaire asking where Roberto likes to eat when he’s in downtown Nashville.”

Bonus: Fucking Snakeheads! Fish sighting in Burnaby lagoon raises alarm (with video). With viddeeoo!

Foreign Intelligence Briefing #403: “Devil’s Breath”, The World’s Most Dangerous Drug

Vice takes us to Bogota to check out “The Devil’s Breath”, a South American flowering plant that, when treated chemically in a way similar to cocaine, creates Scopolamine, a drug that renders (when it doesn’t kill) one outwardly sober but incapable of resisting the will of others.

The first few days in the country were a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine. After meeting only a few people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined.

Fascinating and horrifying. Three cheers for no thanks.

TEA & TWO SLICES: On Bravely Attacking Soup Kitchens And Exporting Vancouverism

by Sean Orr | The Vancouver Sun’s case for banning masks: Guest editorial: Protesters who cover their faces deserve arrest. Once again, notice the image that the Vancouver Sun has chosen (the Guy Fawkes mask was adopted by the Anonymous movement, a peaceful group). Note also how they employ the word “protesters”. I don’t know if the paper is guilty of a Freudian Slip or a rotten lie here, but the truth is that the proposed law is about rioters, not protestors (I’ve been to a whole lot of protests in my time, but only once have I heard the Riot Act being read, and it was after a hockey game).

My case for banning masks: Two arrested during G20 summit were police: watchdog.

Dad still doesn’t get it: Eco-zealots’ hyperbole leaves me green-faced, wherein an anti-environmentalist consults an environmental group to discredit environmentalists. The headline should be: Grrr. I’m dumb, old, and angry. And I vote.

So the Federal Government accidentally funded something really worthwhile that is working, but now they don’t want to fund it anymore: Future uncertain for Bosman Hotel Community

Meanwhile, The Province runs a truly bizarre smear piece on The Dugout, a volunteer-run food dispensary on the DTES. Really? Fuck off and go do some real investigating, like how the Fraser Institute accepts charity.

Leave the micro-politics of a soup kitchen for trolls like Greg Renouf: Does Irwin Oostinde Run SadoMasochist Sex Parties At The W2 Media Centre? Oh god, Greg. Do grow up. Do you actually know what an S&M party looks like? Do I have to Google that for you?

Politics are boring because you just compared them to hockey and reality TV: Thrust and parry of Hansard a limp affair indeed. To quote the kid in the G.I. Joe parody, “Dude, I got no idea what you’re on about”.

Langley responds: Langley Township ‘not District 12′. Cool comeback, bro.

How a completely fabricated city in the desert is like Vancouver: Mirrors, Mirages and Vancouverism in the Middle East.

Bonus: Vancouver Ltd. by Don Gutstein.

SCOUT LIST: The 10 Things That You Should Absolutely Do Between Now And Next Week

by Michelle Sproule | The main objective of this website is to scout out and promote the things that make Vancouver such a sweet place to be. We do this with an emphasis on the city’s independent spirit to foster a sense of connectedness within and between our communities, and to introduce our readers to the people who grow and cook our food, play the raddest tunes in our better venues, create our most interesting art, and design everything from what we wear to the spaces we inhabit. The Scout List is our carefully considered, first rate agenda of super awesome things that we’re either doing, wishing that we could do, or conspiring to do this week. From our calendar to yours… Read more

Foreign Intelligence Briefing #402: Actor Russell Brand Schools Brit MPs On Addiction

Many money quotes, beginning with: “What I want to offer people is truth and authenticity. I think celebrity, as we all know, is a vapid, vacuous, toxic concept used to distract people from what is actually important, and in this case it’s the treatment of people with the disease of addiction.” More.

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