Bandaged hands and a bloody phone

The phone was off the hook and there was blood splattered underneath. Nearby, outside a single-family home, seven or eight cop cars had their lights flashing. An ambulance was parked beside the phone booth and paramedics were walking around the area, not looking too urgent.

Police escorted a black woman out of the house. She wore a yellow t-shirt with a Superman logo emblazoned on the front in green and blue track shorts. There was a little blood on her t-shirt, just to the left of the logo and on her shorts as well. The woman’s forearms were in bandages and as the police gently led her away, they seemed to almost gently place her arms behind her back.

Several people stood near the phone watching. No one seemed to know what had happened. They were just curious.

The police led the woman to the ambulance and closed the doors after she entered. Later, they spoke to a tall man outside the house who also had bandages on his forearms. I left shortly thereafter.

A couple hours later I returned to use the phone. The blood had dried underneath and the receiver was back on the hook. As I pedalled past the house, the woman was in her front yard, speaking over a white picket fence with her neighbour. The police cars were gone.

Incentive to dodge

A two-zone transit pass in Vancouver costs $100. The fine for getting caught without a pass is $150. And yet I have yet to be checked on the Skytrain for a pass. Granted, for most of the past four months I’ve only been taking it two stops – the rest of my journey was via bus, where one usually has to flash a pass to the driver. But if I am not checked in the next two months, I’ll consider Vancouver’s transit fining authority out of wack.

Let’s consider your average commuter living off of the Skytrain. If you pay a $150 fine every two months you’ll come out ahead of those who buy two monthly passes. Even given an extra $30 for the worry caused by looking for cops and maybe a couple of bus passes once or twice, you’d still be better riding na gapa, as they say in Poland.

Of course, maybe they check passes more often out in Burnaby, where there are more two-zone riders. So we’ll see.

Andrew W.K. and Evaporator photos up (but not here)

As per my previous post on the Andrew W.K. and Evaporator concert Tuesday night, photos are now up here on uptownsound.ca.

B.C. says, no parking

Anybody who has set foot in Waterton Lakes National Park knows how special that little patch of land in Alberta’s southwestern corner is. Turns out,  environmentalists say there’s an equally impressive patch in nearby British Columbia. But that patch – the Flathead River valley – is unprotected and possibly the site of a to-be-constructed coal mine. So environmental groups are petitioning the UN to declare Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park – a UNESCO heritage site that includes both Waterton Lakes and Glacier National Park, in Montana – a heritage site in danger.

You can read the full story here. Oh, and I wrote it. I would have liked to speak to someone from the British Columbia government. Indeed, I would still like to. But my phone records will show plenty of outgoing calls to various government offices and no incoming calls.

A garbage can and a box

The bus was empty, so she had no problem hoisting a large, grey and round, three-foot deep, 80-gallon garbage can to the back row of seats. In the garbage can was a box wrapped in a black garbage bag.

After she sat down – in the left-most of the five back-row seats – she removed the box, put it on the ground in front of her, then sat the garbage can on top of the box.

“You never know when you’ll need a garbage can,” she said to the shaggy man in the middle of the back row.

She had on a grey tank top and wore jean shorts. Her legs were filthy but her speech coherent and her general aura that of confidence and, if not joy, then at least satisfaction. She rode the bus for a dozen or so stops, from West Hastings, up past the community centre, onto Main Street and towards Broadway. There, she maneuvered her box and garbage can – seperately – through the now-crowded bus to the back doors.

Vancouver versus Warsaw

I know what you’re thinking. Like millions around the world, you’re wondering whether you want to live in Vancouver or Warsaw. I know, it’s a difficult choice, but with some help, maybe you’ll get through.

Like I posted earlier, every person is liable to like, or dislike, a city based on their own preferences and hobbies. But I’ll take a stab at it.

First up, and because I don’t have much time to write right now, the sun and the sky:

The weather, from my own limited experience, is a draw. Warsaw can be warm in the summer, as can Vancouver. Given that I’ve never experienced a Warsaw summer, I don’t think I can compare the two sunny seasons. But I have seen both cities in the winter and neither one is particularly attractive. Both are rainy, grey and dreary. Warsaw gets a little more snow, which can be good or bad, but Vancouver gets a lot more rain, which is definitely bad. On the other hand, Warsaw is quite a bit further north, which means that even when you can see the sun, it dips before the flat horizon before 4 p.m. in winter.

I was going to give Vancouver the point because you can easily retreat into the interior of B.C. to soak up sun or snow. But then I realized that while Poland itself may not be as climatically diverse as B.C., the good transportation links that link Warsaw with, say, Milan, even the field once again.

So a draw it is.

My nice city

It seems I now live in the most liveabile city in the world.

That’s nice. And although the Economist, which did the study, explains how it categorizes the cities, you have to wonder just how arbatrary such rankings are. After all, different cities are more liveable than others depending on what one is looking for. If you’re looking to get out of the city each weekend, Vancouver is close to mountains and such, but the traffic is killer. Calgary might be better, but there’s less around. Toronto…. Where ya gonna go?

But then, if liveability depends on how many concerts you can get to, well you’ll have a whole other list of cities.

Which isn’t to debunk any ratings of cities, but to kind of emphasize the fact that the appeal of any city can depend on the person doing the rating. Of course, the Economist rates general attributes most people consider universally positive so it is objective. But I’d like it to compare the big cities with smaller more regional cities as well (although that would obviously be too much work for a publication that looks at the whole world).

Richard Florida has a book called Who’s Your City. I’m not sure if he considers this (he’s an urban planner), but his title seems to relate.

Just a thought

Granny ghettos

Wherever you look in Warsaw, you’re liable to spot an elderly man or woman trudging along the sidewalk or sidling onto the subway, cane in one hand, grocery bags in the other.

Observing this, Magda pointed out today that there seem to be a lot of old people out and about in Warsaw, more than back home in Vernon or Kamloops. I’m not so sure but there does seem to be something there. As compared to Warsaw, in Vernon, which has a very healthy (if that is the right word) pacemaker-per-capita ratio, the elderly seem less visible.

Why? I have a couple theories. One, there are simply more pedestrians here, ourselves included, than back home where more people drive. More pedestrians mean more old pedestrians. My second theory, I think, is more interesting and perhaps worthy of further investigation.

In Warsaw, the elderly seem to be rather spread out. The hundreds of apartment blocks provide plenty of housing (some reasonably priced, some not so much) for the elderly all around the city. Those apartment blocks are also home to young families, teenagers, professionals and kindergartents.

In Vernon, however, elderly populations are very much confined to certain neighbourhoods. Granny ghettos, if you will. They live, play and go for walks within their closed communities, in their courtyards and, in downtown Vernon, between their apartment buildings, the Schubert Centre and Safeway. The result is a more age-homogenized population.

It is also, as Tom Lancaster, the man in charge of Vernon’s OCP, told me a couple years ago unhealthy for cities.

“You need the vibrancy of youth, you need the vibrancy of children, you need the whole spectrum and I think for a long time we’ve developed cities where we segregate people of the various age groups,” said Lancaster.

“It doesn’t work. You’ve got to mix all these things together to the point where older folks are no longer walking down the street and are afraid of the youth because they don’t live by them or youth are not going around making jokes at the expense of older folks or you don’t have people complining about the noise of young children bouncing a ball on the street.

“It’s ridiculous,” Lancaster said of gated age-restricted communities. “Part of life is all the different age groups and we need to wrap our minds around that.”

There be fish in those waters

Great story in the Kelowna Capital News by Kevin Parnell on rainbow trout in Okanagan Lake. Just don’t try and get steamrolled by a speedboat:

When you look at the gong show that is boating on Okanagan Lake, it’s tough to picture an angler sitting in an aluminum boat, trolling his lure or fly. There’s just not that much room.

But in the shoulder seasons of early spring and late fall, when the cigar boats are locked up for another season, there is some excellent fishing to be had on Okanagan Lake.

Rainbow trout weighing upwards of 10 pounds are not out of the ordinary. Twenty-pounders plus are said to lurk in the clear, cold waters.

“It’s a tough lake to fish but it can be very rewarding,” said Rod Hennig, the owner of Rodney’s Reel Outdoors, a fish guiding service that has been in operation for three years.