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[caption id="attachment_2706" align="alignnone" width="497"] Definitely looking a little bleary-eyed. Still getting used to the new work schedule.[/caption]

These little bandits used to be nocturnal. I distinctly remember that about raccoons: Sleep during the day; eating, and hi jinx all night. I think they've switched to a shift system, so now they just work around the clock. Click the images to enlarge them.

[caption id="attachment_2687" align="alignnone" width="497"] Blueberry pie, and ice cream -- in a cup! Tastes better than it looks, which in itself is different for McDonalds. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

Yesterday evening, while enjoying some weak McWiFi, I witnessed a flash young couple breeze in. Very fond of themselves, and each other, I thought. They proceeded to order a single McFlurry -- perhaps negotiate is a better characterization of what ensued. The weren't interested in standard McFlurry toppings -- they wanted blueberry pie -- A blueberry pie, McFlurried. This was far above the pay grade of an ordinary McDonalds counter-person, so a manager stepped in, and I became really interested, because, the manager not only agreed to do it, she instructed her young McMinion to charge it, not as a McFlurry, and a pie, but rather as an ice cream cone in a cup, and a pie -- much cheaper; the manager then took charge of the delicate operation of filling the cup with ice cream, then taking the blueberry pie out of the box and breaking it up in the cup, and then mixing it all together with the McFlurry mixer. The couple took to their their custom mcFlurry like they were having sex with it. I thought, "I gotta get me some of that action!"

This afternoon, as luck would have it, the same manager was on shift, and I asked her about getting a blueberry pie McFlurry, just like the couple, the previous evening. "Oh sure," she said, and again, explained to a young order-taker how to charge for it. It cost, $5.01 CAN, about a dollar cheaper than if I'd been charged for a McFlurry and pie.

It does make a very tasty McFlurry. The pie breaks up into many different-sized bits, which is more interesting than the rigorously-uniform standard topping. I found it somewhat less sweet than a stock McFlurry, which was a bonus. And, yes; it's blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream as many of us prepared it when we were five-years-old: mash, mash, mash! One big flaw was the high temperature of the pie, which warmed up the ice cream too quickly, so after the first few ice cold spoonfuls, the McFlurry became warmer and runnier, but still tasty. My favourite is still a McFlurry with plain strawberry mixed in.

Orange may be my favourite colour, so I couldn't help but stop and look at the little pile of stuff left by some blue bins -- stuff the store just around the corner couldn't sell, I'm guessing -- expensive, unnecessary lifestyle accoutrements. I think the place mat construction, if it was bowl-shaped, might make an interesting colander design, but I'm reaching here. Click on the images to enlarge them.

Few things are as pointless as wee luggage padlocks, yet I'm a big fan of the little guys. There was no key for the lock pictured above, but I was tempted to keep it any ways -- I've never seen a brass padlock with the locking mechanism at 90 degrees to the shank, like some bicycle U-locks. For scale, I've included a Canadian nickel, which is, I think, five inches in diameter. Click the image to enlarge.

[caption id="attachment_2666" align="alignnone" width="497"] This film doesn't even have good stills! But click the image to enlarge it anyways.[/caption]

Blockbuster movies starring the Pacific Ocean have a poor track record. It's been little more than a year since audiences told Universal Pictures, "We sunk your battleship!" Now comes Pacific Rim, a science fiction, action-adventure film, set to open July 12. The trailers I've watched make it look an awful lot like Transformers, and Battleship, and Cloverfield, all rolled together -- and, did I mention "awful?"

Speaking as a binner, this is definitely inexplicable. But it looks neat, and it gets even better.



The Internet tells me this is a Honda CB550 cafe racer; circa. 1974-1978; I don't know exactly what that means; I just know I really like the way this motorcycle looks. Whether it lives here, or is just visiting, I can't say, but it adds style to an otherwise dull parking lot behind a Fairview apartment building. My search on Honda CB550s showed that no two seem to look the same -- not even frame geometry. I was lucky to find this Web page ► talking about this particular Honda CB550 Cafe Racer (near the bottom of the linked page). Click the images to enlarge them.

[caption id="attachment_2653" align="alignnone" width="497"] Vroom, vroom![/caption]

Many people are unaware that owls sleep with their eyes open. This one didn't stir a bit when I opened the lid of the container bin -- obviously tuckered out after a nocturnal hunting spree. While a recycling blue bin in the Fairview neighbourhood is  not a natural roosting place, owls, like this one, faced with shrinking habitat, have shown great flexibility in adapting to living in a more urban environment.

Here we are, looking at the fancy brass sign on The Georgia Straight newspaper's current offices on the South-West corner of West Broadway Avenue, and Pine Street, in a richly refurbished 1948 building. The Straight's tremendous success makes me feel good. I worked for the newspaper, full-time, for nearly 10 year; then they were a major freelance client for another 12 years; my last piece, was a January, 2004 cover illustration showing George W. Bush looking up the word "moron" in a dictionary.

I started at The Georgia Straight in 1983, as something of a Wunderkind. The gig was to save the paper. It had published for some years under it's publishing company name: The Vancouver Free Press. In 1983, I was part of a small team that was supposed to reboot it again, as The Georgia Straight. I wasn't the Editor, or Art Director. I was a witchy little sh*t who, apparently ate, slept, and pooped clever design. My colleagues gave me an awful lot of rope.





I assume it was 1984, 1985; The Straight was located on 4th Avenue. Behind the office area, we had a warehouse space with a big loading bay door. I had acquired a jigsaw! This caused some concern. My co-workers watched silently as I scrounged plywood, brushes, three colours of paint, and shelf brackets. Oh, and I had, what was surely a World War II surplus overhead projector -- "The war's over, we can't make tanks any more. Let's make A/V equipment for schools!"

No one quite understood what I was doing -- Art Director, Bob Mercer, had created a bold new Georgia Straight logo. Years before, Illustrator Rand Holmes, one of the Straight's most important contributors, designed a mascot for the paper, a newsboy called "Mr. Wuxtry." I wanted to reinvigorate this brilliant icon, and part of my plan was to make a life-size version.

[caption id="attachment_2622" align="alignright" width="193"] Georgia Straight publisher Dan McLeod posing with Mr. Wuxtry in 2013. -- photo: The Province[/caption]

I explained to one and all that Mr. Wuxtry would have a two-piece hand to hold the current issue of the newspaper. He'd stand, and hold that paper, at any event we sponsored; he'd be synonymous with The Georgia Straight! Smiles and nods. I finished him, and he was an instant hit. When he wasn't attending movie premieres, he stood in the lobby, holding the current issue for all to see. He made the move from 4th Avenue to new digs on Pender, from Pender to Burrard, and, from Burrard to his current home, on West Broadway, and Pine.

It's weird to see my Mr. Wuxtry. he's near-on 30-years-old; quite tatty, and can't even stand up properly anymore. The weirdest thing is that of all the things I did at The Straight -- the covers, the inside illustrations, the page layouts, the articles -- he's the thing that lasts. That is so funny! Click the images to enlarge them.

The Georgia Straight is a solidly established critic of the Establishment -- go figure. The Straight started in 1967, at a time when hippies were starting counter-culture newspapers all across North America. Nearly 50 years later, The Georgia Straight is, I believe, the last one standing; that's down to the indomitable publisher, and original member of the founding collective, Dan McLeod. It's true also that a steady stream of young talent helped keep it going. It's well-known that Boomtown Rats' Bob Geldoff served as a music critic briefly in the 1970s; less well-known that Doug Bennett, of Doug and the Slugs, art-directed the paper for a while, also in the 1970s. A lot of local writers, such as Tom Harrison cut their teeth at The Straight.

I had the opportunity to bin behind, beside, in front of, and around, two City of Vancouver workers idly putting the above notice on every grey garbage bin they could find. They were doing a very good job, in that the job requirements appeared very easy to satisfy. The pair's technique appeared to be to wedge part of the notice into the lid hinge, to keep it from being blown away in the furious wind their bustle was stirring up, I guess. It's worth drawing attention to the fact that two of them were needed to affix a notice to each bin -- like I said, a good job, if you could get it. I see this morning that another section of Fairview, three bocks North, may have been "noticed" by a different crew -- each bin has a notice hanging off it, neatly tied to the hinge. We are so laid back. Click the image to enlarge it.

It finally looks like Vancouver's oldest bottle depot, United We Can, will be moving to a new location -- reportedly in an industrial area, far from it's present location on Hastings Street, in the heart of the Downtown Eastside.

According to a recent article in The Vancouver Sun newspaper, The not-for-profit depot, which has been a fixture on East Hastings for more than a decade, is expected to move to a 21,000 sq. ft. warehouse at 455 Industrial Ave. The property is owned by the City of Vancouver.

If I could, I'd get you one -- you and I both know you want it. Who among us couldn't find something to do with one of these? Light gardening, weeding, digging an extension for that End Times bomb shelter. When you're not backing, and filling, you could just sit in it and use it as your "quiet place;" it even has really big cup holder.

[caption id="attachment_2542" align="alignnone" width="497"] The bike racks outside MEC on West Broadway, today. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

I earn money by binning. I use a bicycle, with a bike trailer, to collect beverage containers to recover the deposit -- keeping my ride is a matter of being able to support myself,  so naturally I take bike security seriously.

Some basic suggestions:

• Make your bike less attractive to steal than someone else’s.


• Choose a security routine you can follow like a second nature.


• Lock both wheels -- Use a long, 11-inch U-lock and a chain, or two short U-locks. Whatever.


• Ask at a decent bike store about locking bike skewers, which can make it that much harder for thieves to take your wheels.


• If you lock your bike up outside overnight, get six feet of transport chain and a mini U-lock, which always stays locked to the railing or pole where you lock the bike.


• Don't leave easily removable do-dads on your bike, like lights, unless you are in a gift-giving mood.

Everyone should have disk brakes, but I don't. My bike uses a rim brake system: Linear pull brakes, otherwise called V-brakes, which are easier to change than the older cantilever system, but still annoying. Switching to a cartridge brake system in December has made my V-brakes, more-or-less, hassle-free. Every bike store should sell cartridge brake shoes and pads; lots of different companies make them. I've read they are available for cantilever brakes also, though I've only seen them for V-brakes.

I see a Bud logo, and I see a Vancouver Canucks logo, and that red thing looks like a goal tender's mask, so, some sort of ice hockey-themed beer dispenser, I'm guessing. I'm blank on exactly how, or why. I left it where I saw it, by some blue bins, and went to get a coffee, and lo and behold, it had followed me -- another binner had it stuffed in a blue Ikea bag, so I'm guessing, and hoping, it found it's way to the informal second-hand store that is the Downtown Eastside: "Psst, wanna buy a hockey, beer-dispensing thing, cheap?" Click the images to enlarge them.

[caption id="attachment_2493" align="alignnone" width="497"] This water-logged snow globe, left out by a dumpster, brought to mind the floods which hit Calgary, Alberta, this last week. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_2492" align="alignright" width="187"] Calgary is 970 km from Vancouver; ideologically farther.[/caption]

In the Canadian Province of Alberta, next door, and to the East of British Columbia, the city of Calgary is just beginning to clean up after five days of flash flooding caused be heavy rains. The city centre was hit hard enough to raise doubts about the fate of this year's Calgary Stampede, a signature rodeo event which draws tourists from around the world.

Displaying the can-do spirit typifying Calgarians' response to the natural disaster, Stampede President Bob Thompson announced today the 101st Calgary Stampede will run as scheduled from July 5-14. Sometimes I think of Albertans as reactionary rednecks, thick as the oil sands crude they're promoting for American petroleum self-sufficiency, but, this week, I've been really proud of them.

Alberta flood recovery ►

Calgary Stampede to go on ►

This is a shot of the Royal Bank building on the North-East corner of Broadway and Granville. I'm very fond of this kind of 1950s Modernist architecture -- the limestone panels, and marble veneer, along with a ... ah heck. Who am I kidding. It's true, I like this building, but I see the darn thing EVERY day! I was trying to take another dumb photo of a eye-catching car in traffic. Simple task, simple camera. Simple Stanley! Yeesh!

[caption id="attachment_2480" align="alignnone" width="497"] Sweet T-shirt! In a bag, inside another bag, of clothes. Click the image and be jealous.[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_2475" align="alignnone" width="497"] Great-looking, plastic palm tree -- I'm quite "frond" of it. Somewhere in Vancouver there's a South-East Asian restaurant that wants this for their décor![/caption]

Ubuntu, trying hard not to look like the GNU/Linux of old, gives it's users a single graphical pipeline to install software over the Internet, called the Ubuntu Software Centre. But under the candy coating of the Unity graphical interface, all the old ways of installing software still work, and many would argue they still work much better than the user friendly, lumbering Software Centre  -- I say it's good to have choices. One benefit of understanding the various methods, is that it gives you the freedom to install most any Linux software, not just the wares in the Software Centre.

This was the scene Wednesday afternoon, on the North-West corner of 8th Avenue, and Cambie Street. Five women were handing out coffee samples out of the back of a hatchback to promote the Keurig single cup brewing system. They were doing it beside a Provincial government-run liquor store, but the coffee quintet was fishing here for the generally large crowds, from two nearby supermarkets, two nearby big box retailers, and West Broadway, just one block South.

Hollyburn Court, at 550 West 12th Avenue, just one building West of the intersection with Cambie Street, is partially clad in blue ceramic tile, identical -- to my eye -- to the blue tile cladding much of the  Fairview  apartment building I've previously blogged about. My idea here, being that these both may be Wosk Brothers' developments, from the 1960s, and 1970s, which were notably clad in such blue tile.

My route to a bottle depot took me by the 1930s-era, Art Moderne, Vancouver City Hall, at Cambie Street, and 12th Avenue. The old Hall looks especially good beside duller, contemporary architecture, not the least because it's been recently power washed from top to bottom. It was a kind of public works project when it was built at the height of the Great Depression, but that's a tale for another post. Today, as I rode past the main entrance (illegally, on the sidewalk!), I saw two guys trying to wrestle a chunk of skyline into their hatchback.

A binner explained to me that he'd found this in a bag of women's clothing. Golly. Whatever could it be?

"Honey, where's the blackjack?"
Right where you left it Pookey -- beside your keys, on the hall table."
"OK. Got it. Now where are those knuckles?"

Honestly, it's not that surprising. People in Fairview seem to buy everything, and sooner or later, they throw it all away.

Concerning clothes: Lots of clothing gets put out in Fairview, and neighbouring Kitsilano -- mostly women's, in my experience. In fact, women, as a rule, seem to work at putting clothing out in the lanes; they wash it, fold it, and package it nice, and tidily. When men put clothing out, they could care less, it seems, generally just dumping it in a pile, apparently as a way to avoid doing laundry.

This is screwed to a peeling garage in a back lane in sight of Vancouver City Hall, at Cambie Street, and 12th Avenue. I'd rather see this trite platitude graven on the sidewalks of the South-East corner of Broadway and Granville, a noted wildlife refuge for panhandlers. Click the image to enlarge.

[caption id="attachment_2355" align="alignright" width="97"] Vancouver City Councillor Adriane Carr.[/caption]

Last Sunday, In Vancouver's downtown West End neighbourhood a group pushing for a one cent deposit on cigarette butts, collected, and paid out, on some 60,000 of the discarded stinkers ► -- this was during the West End's Car Free Day -- fortunately, not Carr Free, because Vancouver's Green party City Councillor, Adriane Carr has now lent her voice to calls for a provincial cigarette butt deposit and refund program. ► The more mundane problems, like under employment, affordable housing, drug addiction, and crime (petty to very organized), will just have to wait while everyone tackles the burning issue of cigarette butts.

Excuse my language, but it's true, literally. An article in yesterday's Vancouver Sun newspaper talked about frustration over homeless people in Abbotsford, B.C., and, by way of illustration, described how Abby's municipal workers more-or-less carpet-bombed one homeless person's campsite with chicken manure. The article cited a separate incident where police pepper sprayed another homeless person's campsite. With the incidents in the press, Abbotsford's Mayor, Bruce Banman, expressed his disapproval over how the municipal workers acted, and Police Chief Bob Rich said his department was investigating the pepper spraying incident. Today, however, The Province newspaper, in their editorial, suggested that Abbotsford had a long history of harassing it's homeless people, which currently are thought to number about 200, in a general population of over 133,000 (2011). Ironically, according to the Wikipedia article, Abbotsford has been named by Stats Canada as the nation's most generous city in terms of donations for nine straight years.

Followup: internal emails reveal extent of manure dump planning ►

What was brewin' at Waves Coffee? Another bruin-topped Mocha, of course. I think Kiran, the un-bear-ably clever barista, has all but perfected her latte art technique on this one. How quickly the extraordinary can become ordinary. I'm already pining for a panda. Don't forget, it's always delicious, no matter what it looks like. Click the top image to see it larger.

It rains here. It's been raining most of the day, in fact. A small, easy-to-carry, umbrella will keep you perfectly dry, but that's no good if you need your hands to, say, root through, recycling bins, or dumpsters, in search of discarded valuables. If you're a binner, with no umbrella, and no coated nylon rain jacket, there's no problem; a large garbage bag, like the one modelled by the binner on the right, is easy to find in a pinch, and works ridiculously well. What about your running shoes, you ask? Put small plastic bags over your sock-clad feet, and put your runners back on; the runners will get wet, but your feet, and socks, will stay nice and dry. Click the image to enlarge.

The Midway came to West Broadway this morning. From my breakfast perch near South Granville, I noticed the West-bound, rush hour traffic was liberally spiced, for a time, with big trucks hauling an assortment of outlandish, and eye-catching things, such as giant strawberries. All the trucks were marked "Shooting Star Amusements," According to their Web site, the Langley, B.C.-based "mobile midway," is bringing their classic-style circus, including bumper cars, Ferris Wheel, and cotton candy, to the Point Grey Fiesta, at Trimble Park, over the weekend, June 21 to 23. Neighbourhoods-wise, travelling West, it's Fairview (where I saw the trucks), Kitsilano, then Point Grey --- here's a good neighbourhood map ►. Click the images to enlarge them.