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This was yesterday, in the late afternoon, at 10th Avenue, and Cambie Street. A city road crew has just wrapped up work on the East corner. I'm about five minutes, and three blocks away from running into another city road crew, making my total for the day five. The view North is pretty spectacular (yawn). Vancouver's a bit like a 24-hour casino, with nature as a complimentary floor show to bring in the rubes tourists. locals take it too much for granted. Like maybe it would be good for nature to withhold it's services once in a while, to force us to see what's right in front of our eyes; remember to treasure it, and take care of it. Perhaps people who live in postcards never concern themselves with who's paying the postage. Click the image to enlarge it.

Apropos of the headline, Cambie Street is named for Henry John Cambie (1836-1928), an Irish-born Canadian surveyor, and civil engineer, best remembered for his important role with the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railroad) in bringing the country's transcontinental railroad to completion at it's Vancouver terminus. There are no train tracks near Cambie St. that I've ever seen. Arbutus Street, which is about three kilometres West, and closely paralleled by train tracks, is named after a tree.

I was aiming for the city works crew in the distance. This woman appeared out of nowhere, and, well -- way to take over a scene. That's how to walk in an alley!

[caption id="attachment_5532" align="alignright" width="150"] Her focused shot came after about ten like this![/caption]

All day, I was running into lane-blocking city works crews, with their indefatigable fllaggers, orange traffic cones, and blinking lights. When I saw this crew, I decided to take some photos of them, I set my little tripod up on the teal dumpster and started snapping, but the camera just wouldn't focus, until this shot, and only for this shot. Obviously the camera prefers to take photos of women, and who can blame it. The accidental subject didn't mind being accidentally photographed, and kept right on walking. In my imagination she still is. Click the images to enlarge them.

The mural on the left was the subject of this post ►

In my Town called Toyota post, showcasing a blue Toyota that's absolutely plastered with plastic toys, and doo-dads, I mentioned another similarly encrusted car, I see elsewhere in Fairview; here it is. Doesn't look anything like the Toyota, and not just because it's red. The artist's hand has been trying for quite a different effect, using stickers; sort of short on the sides, and back, and long on the top. The auto-motive behind this kind of folk art is clearly individual expression, so I'll let the photos of the car speak for themselves. Click the images to enlarge them.

Updating my post about the disparity between the front, and back of the West Broadway location of Future Shop. It seemed as though they ran out of money when it came time to do signage for the loading bay, off the back alley, but -- good news -- all these many years later, they've sold enough personal, and home electronics, to finally be able to afford to add that missing letter "E." Click the image to enlarge it.

store,

Being homeless isn't illegal -- yet, but there's already a fine line between living on the street, and breaking the law. Florida Pete crossed that line yesterday in a park near Kingsgate Mall, at Broadway Avenue, and Main Street. Police issued him with a $115 CDN fine for -- Pete insists -- smoking a cigarette in the park, though the ticket lists the offense as being intoxicated in public. Pete's on the far end of alcoholism, where a person needs alcohol just to function, so, technically, he's a walking by-law infraction. Pete explained to me that the same offense on a city street is a $165 fine. and that he got off cheap because he was in a park. if Pete had any intentions of paying the ticket -- that's something like 2300 pop cans -- the police miss-spelled his last name.

Speaking of police issuing tickets to the poor, and homeless ...

After it was revealed in the spring that the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) were issuing most of their fines for jaywalking to people in the Downtown Eastside, the so-called poorest postal code in Canada, I wrote a post suggesting we make the DTES a car-free zone. Fortunately, the Pivot Legal Society, and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), took a less trivial approach, and filed a complaint with the Vancouver police board, chaired by the city's mayor, Gregor Robertson. The complaint, based on the VPD's own data, alleged 95 per cent of tickets for illegal street vendors and 75 per cent for jaywalking were issued in the Downtown Eastside. The Province newspaper this morning is reporting that the police board have dismissed the ticket-target complaint. Click the images to enlarge them.

"Business are open?" They say "truth is the first casualty of war." I don't know about that -- and I don't know who they are -- I'm Canadian -- a nationality equivalent to low-impact aerobics. "War" is a great song I grew up hearing on the radio. I can, however, vouch for the fact that spelling is often the first casualty of technology, A good example, aside from the above LED sign, which is "Too Good To Be Forgotten" (2G2B4G in SMS text-speak), is the old 1990s eight-dot-three file naming convention in the Windows operating system. People learned to strip the vowels out of file names they were creating, and put them back in file names they were reading, so Windows98,doc became "wndws98.doc." Sounds like fun, huh?

Last night's moon over Vancouver (I'm told everyone on Earth sees the same one, but I find that hard to believe).

Following up my post about a motorhome scraping through the narrow lane behind my sleeping spot, here are some photos of the wall of the condo, which the Winnebago, very noisily scraped on it's way through. The lowest damage will be from the motorhome, the higher breakage is from something else.