Image: Market Street National Bank

Support For “The Drive” on The Drive

It is about three and a half years since I published “The Drive“ and our local booksellers and buyers keep supporting it.

I want to thank both Canterbury Tales Bookstore and The People’s Co-op Bookstore for their recent repeat orders, and I urge everyone to keep supporting these local bookstores who help keep our culture thriving against all the odds.

I also want to thank the owners and staff at SuperValu at First & Commercial which has managed to sell more than a hundred copies this year (see display at Cashier #1).

It is time for another book, I know. But I enjoy the research so much that it is hard to put that aside and actually construct a narrative.  Fingers crossed for 2016!

Daylight Saving — The Trailer

Further to my cri de coeur yesterday, a dear friend sent me this brilliant movie:

My compliments to the brilliant filmmakers!

Image: Breakfast

Night Music: Adele

Wise Words

Again With The Time-Shifting Nonsense

Tomorrow night we turn the clocks back one hour in a continuation of an archaic, uneconomic, dangerous and energy-wasting exercise favoured by the big gas companies. How can we still be so stupid!

One of the very first things I’ll do when they make me God is to cancel this nonsense.

Until then, this is the twice a year moment when I wish I lived in Saskatchewan!

Image: Peaceful Morning

Night Music: I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Image: Closing In

Lottery Obesity

I notice that this Friday’s lottery is worth $55 million plus another $12 million in extra prizes. Beyond the issue of lotteries being a tax on the poor based entirely on a greedy society, the total prize fund seems ridiculous to me.

People will still buy the tickets if the prize was capped at, say, $25 million. After all, everyone is aware that the infinitesimally tiny odds of winning don’t change dramatically with the inflated prizes. And this week alone, for example, we would have an additional $47 million to distribute to help solve some of societiy’s genuine problems — affordable housing, mental health issues, increased use of food banks, infrastructure in First Nations’ communities, etc., etc.

This would produce hundreds of millions a year spread around for the general welfare. Wouldn’t this be more worthwhile than creating a small number of extremely lucky millionaires, while still allowing the “dreams” that $25 million could bring?

Night Music: Days Like This

Poem: Southern Comfort

 

It was a slam bam thank you ma’am kind of night.

“It’s alright,” she said with a slight frisson of uncertainty perhaps

as she unwraps and taps the money-box on the dresser.

He pays to caress her, to possess her as she bumps and grinds

and too quickly finds the kind of passion paid for.

He wants more before he’ll leave: sixteen and still hard.

But she’s on guard, body barred against free love.

Push came to shove.  Above his pleas she screamed and screamed

until the apartment teemed with neighbours and passers-by

who wondered why this nigger came by and by to be in a white girl’s room.

 

It’s a warm, hormone-rushing, mosquito-swarming kind of night.

Fox-fire bright, passions tightly wound and sprung.

No brass bells are rung, no masses sung, but masses gather to enjoy

the black boy toy with the last of his time on a slippery slope

as the hempen rope grips and gropes for his hopeless neck.

 

Image: Stormy Mountain Sunset

The Invasion Of Grenada

On October 25, 1983, the United States invaded the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada (“Operation Urgent Fury”).  The 1,500-strong Grenadian Army, along with 600 Cuban allies, were considered such a strategic threat to the Imperial Power that Ronnie Reagan sent in the Marines, lying through his teeth to his erstwhile ally Margaret Thatcher all the while.

In case we didn’t get the message:  opposition to the power will be crushed ruthlessly no matter how petty it makes the power look.

Night Music: I Can’t Make You Love Me

Image: Gator I

Wise Words

Night Music: Blood Sweat & Tears

Keeping The Day Job

For the last three years, while — as this blog has reported — being heavily involved in community politics, in eating, and sleeping, and reading, and generally living life, I have managed in odd moments to keep working at my day job as an historian of East Vancouver.

In part, I have been researching and preparing another two books on the history of Grandview; these remain works in progress.  However, as background to these projects, I have been developing a Database of Grandview properties, and a version of this has now been published on the Grandview Heritage website.

The database contains details on 5,000 buildings in Grandview, more than 1,100 of which no longer exist.  It continues to grow daily and the hope is that, eventually, it will contain all the historical details of every structure that has been in the neighbourhood.  I plan monthly updates.

For some, this will be a lot like reading a telephone directory, I suppose. But I hope that for those interested in our history it will be a valuable resource for many years to come.