Month: January 2011

Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted.

The First Decade of the Future is Behind Us:

“Imagine it’s 1995: almost no one but Gordon Gekko and Zack Morris have cellphones, pagers are the norm; dial-up modems screech and scream to connect you an internet without Google, Facebook, or YouTube; Dolly has not yet been cloned; the first Playstation is the cutting edge in gaming technology; the Human Genome Project is creeping along; Mir is still in space; MTV still plays music; Forrest Gump wins an academy award and Pixar releases their first feature film, Toy Story. Now take that mindset and pretend you’re reading the first page of a new sci-fi novel:

The year is 2010. America has been at war for the first decade of the 21st century and is recovering from the largest recession since the Great Depression. Air travel security uses full-body X-rays to detect weapons and bombs. The president, who is African-American, uses a wireless phone, which he keeps in his pocket, to communicate with his aides and cabinet members from anywhere in the world. This smart phone, called a “Blackberry,” allows him to access the world wide web at high speed, take pictures, and send emails.

It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D televisions. Video games can be controlled with nothing but gestures, voice commands and body movement. In the news, a rogue Australian cyberterrorist is wanted by world’s largest governments and corporations for leaking secret information over the world wide web; spaceflight has been privatized by two major companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX; and Time Magazine’s person of the year (and subject of an Oscar-worthy feature film) created a network, “Facebook,” which allows everyone (500 million people) to share their lives online.”

This week: stuffed with potential.

In an effort to prod myself out the door more often, I’ve started scouring the city for events again. The next trick will be to actually go to some of them. (Ex. I intended to hit up the PuSH opening gala last night, but spent time with A. then Lori instead. Fail? Not fail? Still social, though stayed in. Tough call.) That said, here’s some good ideas I’ve chalked in, but haven’t solidified yet. Who’s in?

Tuesday/today

7:00 + 9:30pm – Half Price Tuesday, The Green Hornet by Michel Gondry at The Rio. $6. (With A.)
7-9pm – PuSH: Boca Del Lupo‘s free La Marea, Gastown, zero-hundred block of Water Street.

Wednesday

8-11pm – Jack and Martin from Maria in the Shower, an intimate duo show at The Helm restaurant, 1180 Howe Street. (With Jess.) Company bailed, stayed in.

Thursday

12pm-6pm – PuSH: Iqaluit at the Woodward’s Atrium.
7-9pm – PuSH: Boca Del Lupo‘s free La Marea, Gastown, zero-hundred block of Water Street. (With Beth.) Went to Bin 942 after for delicious tapas and killer chocolate fondue. Holy hell, I had forgotten how completely magical a raspberry tastes. There are no words.
9:30-late – EXCISION (Dubstep Invasion Series) at Gossip, 750 Pacific Blvd. $25.

Friday

9-late – Isaac’s Freaks & 45’s Formal birthday party. (With Tony & ?.)
12am – City of the Lost Children midnight movie at the Rio, (subtitled). Admission is $8 or $7 in costume. Stayed at the party.

Saturday

8-12am – The Tequila Mockingbird Orchestra with Jess Hill at Cafe Deux Soleils. $10-15 sliding scale at the door. (With Tony & ?.) (Sold out before we arrived).
8:30-12am – Stay Wet: An anti-celebration of the 82nd anniversary of the Dry Bill, featuring The Furniture, Blackberry Wood, Antiparty, and The Brass Action at The Railway Club.
9-12am – Karaoke at the Main St. Legion, 3917 Main Street. (Added to this list by request.)
10-2am – SinCity at Club 23 West. (With Tony & A.)

Sunday

2pm – PuSH: 46 Circus Acts in 45 Minutes, UBC Frederic Wood Theatre. 2pm. $12.50 General, $5 Kids under 12, $25 Family of 4 (max 2 adults). Box Office 604.822.2678
3pm – Day for Night: Full Moon in Paris by Eric Rohmer at the Waldorf Cabaret. Went to brunch with Tony and A., then for hot chocolate at Cocoa Nymph.

PuSH festival: La Marea opens tomorrow

Boca Del Lupo, one of Vancouver’s most spectacular theater companies, has a free outdoor show for PuSH this year, La Marea. It starts tomorrow:

A man has just had a motorbike accident… An insomniac tries to get to sleep… A couple has their first kiss… A man stands on a balcony escaping the party that rages on behind him…

When strangers walk past you on the street, do you ever start imagining what they are thinking? Where they come from? Or what they are doing there at the very moment you glance upon them?

At night and in real time, moving from the pavement to illuminated windows, from balconies to café terraces, La Marea presents nine different stories—intimate snapshots that bring the zero hundred block of Water Street in historic Gastown to life for the opening of the 2011 PuSh Festival. These fictional scenes are repeated over the course of the evening in shop windows and on street corners, where audience members can observe the characters’ inner thoughts through projected subtitles.

"It’s an adventure… like a visit to a film set, without the camera crew getting in the way. This isn’t just a play in multiple episodes, it’s an experience touching on the beginning of love, the end of love, and everything in between." – Montreal Gazette

January 18-22, 7pm – 9pm.
Outdoors / Site-specific.
The zero-hundred block of Water Street in Gastown (between Abbott St and Carrall St).

let that be the end of it

As if more evidence was required to show that vaccines don’t cause autism, the British study that linked childhood vaccines to autism was recently proven to be a complicated fraud:

An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.

“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”

The full paper from BMJ is here.

There is no public face.

What’s this scar, I ask, a finger touching his body somewhere the skin is pale and slightly warped, maybe damp, warm from a shower. A crowbar, he says, or a computer case. Something fell, a knife slipped, there is a different explanation for every twisted mark. The disfiguring slice that runs up his thumb, the white curl that runs around the top of his right foot. I am collecting each story, building a narrative, assembling a picture of his body through history. Actions, reactions. Attacked, sleeping somewhere he shouldn’t. Carving a fall through the air, a parachute failure from fourty stories up.

“What would you do if I cut my hair?” “Could I have it?” “That’s not at all what I asked.”

He looks through me like a strange mirror, the reflection off by a fraction. In the deepest center of things, the beginning of a spark. We map territory almost the same, drawing conclusions at an almost cellular level, uncanny and intimately familiar, a dance I’ve never had a partner for, though I long ago conquered the steps. Even as I dig for bones, there is a return archeology, a chemical reaction that burns through skin down to the raw, bloody, hard and honest, that knack of knowing without necessarily knowing why, the same way that when we’re asleep, we unconsciously hold hands in the dark.

I just tried one of the chocolates. My breath stopped.

365:2011/01/01 - twenty:eleven
  • Assorted books for sale – $5
  • Assorted books for sale – $10
  • Lunchboxes, toys, costumes, dvd/vcr – $5-$80

    Today I came home in a bit of a mood, thwarted and unhappy in some very deep places, but what should arrive but a completely unexpected and flat out amazing package from Karen of Strange Horizons. Not a surprise in the usual sense, as she sent me a note about it yesterday, asking if I had received anything from her in the mail, expected due date somewhere the back of December, but because we sadly presumed it to be lost in transit. Yet, to whatever caused the delay, I can only thank it. There could be no better timing. She has an exquisite grace about her that I devoutly admire, mesmerizing even over long distances, and it bleeds into her gifts, which are so sweet and clever as to make me cry, two years now in a row. There’s nothing else like it in my life.

    So though my morning may have started with an ache tightly, bitterly laced to my heart, since I’ve opened the cardboard box to discover it packed full of pretty, delicate paper and shiny hand-curled ribbons in my favourite colours and read her card, scented with sugar and lemon and love, I feel so grateful and vulnerable that if I were to leave the house, I would cover up my face. (Can’t go around blinding people, after all. Pretty sure that’s against the rules.)

    It’s amazing to be reminded so perfectly that though I’m isolated, I’m not alone. Her gifts are witchcraft, sent to foster healing and prevent further harm. Medicine against sadness, (couture chocolates and gourmet mint cocoa), hello kitty for sprains, (a plush ice-pack), sticks and stones to ward off injury from same, (glowsticks and pop rocks), a sweet serum to bring blackbirds back to life, (sugar exfoliant), and one. last. winsome. package. wrapped in turquoise and gold that I am almost afraid to open, because what if my head falls off from awe? Stranger things have happened. Have I mentioned we’ve never met? Stranger things, indeed.