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[caption id="attachment_9598" align="alignnone" width="497"] Regional Recycling is on Evans at the east end and north side of Terminal -- Google Maps.[/caption]

The Regional Recycling Vancouver bottle depot is now open at 7 a.m. every day. The Encorp Return-It depot  still hasn't changed the hours on their Web site but word of the change is spreading among their customers. It was confirmed to me by an email from Regional Vancouver's manager Arlene Watson.

Regional's decision to begin opening one hour earlier comes ahead of another bottle depot's move into the area. United We Can is scheduled to move from the Downtown Eastside to Industrial Avenue any day now.

United We Can bottle depot hasn't moved yet

The United We Can bottle depot at 39 East Hastings Street is apparently still at 39 East Hastings Street even though yesterday ( January 15) was widely reported as the date it was to move to its new location on 455 Industrial Avenue.

[caption id="attachment_6392" align="alignnone" width="497"] I can't find any bedbugs in Fairview. This old photo of a sleeping mouse will have to do.[/caption]

This morning's daily Blatt provided an evocative tableau on its cover: the banner headline "Infested" atop a larger-than-life rat snout.

"Umm, coffee, two eggs, and a side of Downtown Eastside for breakfast this morning?" I thought to myself.

Pretty much, but with a judicial twist; the story described how Vancouver's provincial courthouse on Main street, smack in the heart of the DTES was having escalating problems with bedbugs, mice and now rats.

To you this may be just an unattached garage in Kitsilano that happens to be open. To me it's also raw narrative; a kind of unfinished story, full of details about people's lives -- at least the parts of those lives spent in garages.

The more you look at a garage like this the more it can come to look like a deliberate act of art -- a very detailed diorama. And there are always interesting things to catch your eye.

Joe the panhandler is seen here straight from the sidewalks of West Broadway modelling his particular brand of street chic.

This timeless look, once known by the now-deprecated term "street Arab," is currently referred to as the "crescent roll."

His cartoon nasal voice can be heard imploring people in the South Granville area and. I'm told, in parts unknown in the Kitsilano neighbourhood. Click the image to enlarge it.

[caption id="attachment_8371" align="alignnone" width="497"] Still crispy on the ground but very nearly raining. The orange is my trailer.[/caption]

After it snowed yesterday morning in Vancouver, temperatures hovered at or above zero most of the day. This allowed a thin blanket of snow to cling to the sidewalks, side streets, and back alleys of Fairview. At about 8 p.m. it even resumed snowing lightly -- I was at Cambie, heading west. In the half hour it took me to meandered my way slowly to Granville Street the temperature ticked up ever-so-slightly; the light snow became sleet, and the snow on the ground began to recede. The temperature continued to see-saw all evening.

[caption id="attachment_8045" align="alignnone" width="497"] No contest. For looks and durability, paving blocks are the long-term winner.[/caption]

If I was having a house built, based on what I've seen over the last nine years, I would want my driveway to be made from paving blocks.

Oh don't scoff. Who sees more homes than a homeless binner? In the course of binning for returnable beverage containers in several Vancouver neighbourhhoods, I have not only seen a lot of different homes but I've had the opportunity to see many of them for nine years. And I've noticed how they've held up over that time.

Mind you, I have no experience building anything more complex than a sandwich. So consider what follows accordingly.

[caption id="attachment_7754" align="alignnone" width="497"] These new container bins are not off to a promising start.[/caption]

Since their introduction along West Broadway, I've seen very, very, few returnable containers in Encorp's new Return-It container bins; just lots of trash. Despite the blue paint job, and the blaring signage -- not to mention there being a grey garbage bin beside each one of them -- supposedly recycling-savvy Vancouverites are taking them for just one more place to throw their food wrappers, and drink cups, and dog poop.

To be fair, I've only sampled the bins along the stretch between Cambie Street in the east to Blenheim Street in the west. That's just under 5 km. A much shorter distance than Google first thought it was.

[caption id="attachment_7624" align="alignnone" width="497"] It's unsightly, but the building did it on purpose.[/caption]

The job a building in Fairview recently did labeling their brand new Vancouver grey garbage bins brought to mind Lululemon founder Chip Wilson paying taggers to tag, oops, paint a mural on the seawall of his Kitsilano property.

I agree there are times when it makes sense to hire a real graffiti tagger. This building would have been better off hiring one to label their building's bins. A tagger would've known when and how to to use a a spray can, or a metallic marker. The result would be as clean and legible as they wanted it to be, unlike the uncontrolled mess the building made.

[caption id="attachment_7476" align="alignnone" width="497"] There are bottles all over Vancouver but not bottles depots.[/caption]

There are persistent rumours that the fellow who ran the now shuttered Westside Return-It bottle depot is looking at a location for a new Kitsilano bottle depot somewhere near 4th Avenue and Alma Street. This would be about eight blocks, or a kilometre -- depending how you walk it -- from the old location. Sounds too good to be true, but it is true that in the three months since his bottle depot on West Broadway and Blenheim closed it's doors at the end of July, Sam, the licence holder, has been looking for a new location.

Someone who spoke to him at a recent conference of bottle depot owners, said that he had chosen a location, but nothing was settled. Among other things, he would need the approval of the city, and I have no idea how long that process might take. I've been told he has one year to find a new location before Encorp, the industry stewardship group which oversees the Return-It bottle depot system, rescinds his licence to run a depot.

The daily migration of bottles to East Vancouver

With no bottle depot in Kitsilano, most of the west side's collected beverage containers are being cashed in at two east Vancouver Return-It bottle depots: Go Green, at 7th and Ontario, and Regional Recycling, at 960 Evans Avenue, on the north side of the east end of Terminal Avenue. Go Green's business hasn't doubled but it's customer volume is up considerably. I don't go to Regional very often, but I'm told their volume has increased also.

When worlds collide

In the case of Go Green, it's easy to single out the former Westside regulars; they're the ones who ask for a receipt or are surprised they don't get one. Westside used a computer system with touch screen input to record container types and total the returnable value. Go Green, has, for some 16 years done the counting and totaling manually. But they're in the process of installing two touch screen-driven computer systems. They tell me Encorp has been encouraging them to do this for years. Many of the folks coming from Kitsilano are ordinary binner types. There are also car binners, and residents. A few in this last group have caused memorable scenes, complaining about the smell, all but recoiling from the proximity of actual "street people" and, in one instance, asserting their right to special treatment by declaring: "I'm not a binner!"

The Westside depot was small -- somewhere between a third, to half the size of Go Green. Westside got their fair share of binners but, lots of Kitsilano residents also. The depot seemed full with five customers, so the residential-types could never be overwhelmed by street people-types. That's not the case with the much larger Go Green where you can have about 12 customers sorting bottles at one time.

Hello. Hello?

Staff at Go Green told me of a recent telephone inquiry. A woman called the bottle depot to to say she wanted to bring in her bottles, and asked when was a good time to to come in when there weren't many homeless people. Unfortunately the staff lost the connection with the caller before a suitable answer could be formulated. Darn!

Increasingly I'm seeing trucks and SUVs trying to just go over traffic diverters like the one above. Here the driver of a large truck has made tracks over the diverter at the intersection of Alberta Street, and West Broadway, as if it wasn't even there. One block west, on Columbia Street, there's a newer diverter, doing the same job, which I watched being given it's finishing touches a few months ago. So far it has survived unscathed.

The City of Vancouver has been incorporating traffic calming measures in it's neighbourhood street improvements for at least 30 years. By "traffic calming," I mean traffic circles (aka roundabouts), at neighbourhood intersections; speed bumps near schools, and traffic diverters of all shapes and sizes. The goal is to slow down, and control the flow of traffic, into, and through neighbourhoods, using street architecture rather than just stop signs, or traffic lights.

A shiny little oil slick in a back alley on the west side of Arbutus. Oil spills like this may be bad for the environment, but they're good for my imagination; I've always been fascinated by visual effects such as iridescence -- where the colours changes with the viewing angle. I remember seeing this fairly often 30-plus-years-ago, but these days, it's an uncommon sight. Does that mean, cars are just that much better, or that B.C.'s maligned, and soon-to-end, AirCare car emissions-testing program made the sort of difference supporters said it would? Dunno, The colours are sure purdy! Click the image to enlarge it.

Light takes on physical form in the fog. For this shot, the bike is the camera platform. I'm using a Joby Gorillapod Original tripod -- the goofy, flexi one, except mine's out of a dumpster, and missing a leg, so it's a "bipod." After this comment from Bill Chance, on one of my night photo posts, about a camera mount for a bike, I experimented with wrapping the Joby around the handlebar headset -- works in a pinch. The, um, blob would be the Incrdibell. Click the image to enlarge it.

[caption id="attachment_6691" align="alignnone" width="497"] Home schooling.This shack is piece of Vancouver's heritage: "School 472." Who knew they had skylights like that in 1908?[/caption]

This little structure in the lane behind the home at 19th Avenue, and Laurel Street, is odd. It's not a garage. It's too big to be a playhouse, and it just doesn't accessorize well with the house, what is it? Well, It's a piece of Vancouver's history -- one of the area's early woodframe structures, built way back in 1901, which briefly served as a schoolhouse. And why do these people have it in their yard... because they want to home-school their children? (drumroll). It's sitting there for safe-keeping. The plaque designating it a heritage building tells the basic story.

"Built circa 1901 as a private house at the northeast corner of 19th and Ash, this tiny, side-gabled, woodframe structure is a good example of the pioneer Cottage style. In 1908, it opened, under the direction of Miss H. Messon, as the second school in what was the Municipality of Point Grey. After the opening of Shaughnessy (later Edith Cavell) School, it reverted to a private residence. Few people were aware of its history until the Fall of 1995, when it was threatened by demolition. The school was saved by the efforts of Douglas Park neighbourhood supporters, and by Allen and Bronna Fenichel, who offered to move the building to its present location on their property at 19th and Laurel."

Vancouver's eighth annual Homeless Action Week started on Sunday, October 13, and runs to the 19th. With the Thanksgiving long weekend, HAW 2013 really started Tuesday, October 15 -- so how will the City of Vancouver be using these next five days to raise the issues of homelessness?

This year's HAW is focused on the "invisible homeless," what physicists call "Transient Dark Matter." HAW organizers describe the "invisibly homeless" as people who have a shelter but not a home. They say the solution to homelessness starts with a home. This is so trite that it's easy to forget that it is exactly true

HAL, I said, open the UPS bay door.  Open the damn door HAL! ... Oh, it is open. Never mind HAL, my bad. Click the picture below to enlarge it.

It's gone, as in vanished, vamoosed. The overly tagged truck which hasn't moved from it's parking spot for ... ever, has finally moved out.

The Grumman delivery truck with the tires gone flat, probably under the weight of all the graffiti tags overlaying it's earthbound aluminum airframe, has been the subject of a previous post. I went back about a month ago, and took more photos. I was hoping to come back with a ladder, to see if taggers had spared the roof or not. No rush, I thought. The truck had always been there, and wasn't in any shape to go anywhere, anytime soon.  I was wrong. Within a week the truck was gone. It's still gone. I don't think it's just in for a tune-up either.


Here are the last known photos of an endearing eyesore.

[caption id="attachment_5887" align="alignleft" width="150"] 1995 U.S. postal stamp.[/caption]

Google -- celebrating it's 15th birthday today -- was not named after a comic strip character. The official history is that when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided, in 1997, to ditch the original name -- "BackRub" -- they chose "Google" as a play on “googol,” a number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. They did not name it after the famous cartoon character Barney Google. One blog wonders about this.

The above classic Jeep, seen in Kitsilano, on the other hand, probably was named after a comic strip character: Eugene the Jeep, a go-anywhere, do-anything, little critter, who debuted March 16, 1936, in Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre newspaper comic strip, now called Popeye, after it's star. The Willys MB U.S. Army utility vehicle was introduced five years later in 1941. The theory is that soldiers were so impressed with the new vehicles that they informally named it after the character in the Popeye strip which was "small, able to move between dimensions and could solve seemingly impossible problems." This isn't the only origin story for the name, but it's the one I heard growing up as a rabid comic fan!  Click the images to enlarge them.

Selection of great pre-Popeye Thimble Theatre comic strips ►
search on the phrase “Google in 1998” ►

This is a beautiful motorcycle-sidecar combination. I knew there was another motorcycle-with-sidecar in the same area, but it didn't look anything like this one. Or so I thought. But check this one out first.

In the upscale single-family neighbourhoods, I travel in, B.C.'s main telco, Telus has taken to covering their bland DSL cabinets with a printed 3M anti-graffiti ad-wrap. The wraps tend to be imaged to mimic the background so the cabinet doesn't stick out like such a sore thumb. Apparently the very fact the cabinets are decorated helps deter graffiti. And also the wrap is designed so that spray graffiti, and marker tags are easier to remove. Here are two examples:


This cabinet, from the Arbutus Ridge area, could stand as a definitive example of what Telus is trying to accomplish with ad-wraps. BTW, according to a sticker on the cabinet, the company that wrapped this is Clearvision Media.



This next one, from Kitsilano, doesn't blend in -- I'm betting it reproduces what's behind the fence.

What did you think I meant? Click the images to enlarge them.