June 10, 2010
The decor at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s residence in Ottawa is almost as bad as the very fact of this distasteful event, which – can this really have happened?
March 28, 2010
“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
February 23, 2010
The Göbekli Tepe temple near Şanlıurfa, Turkey, about 20 miles from the Syrian border and not far from Mesopotamia, was discovered by a Kurdish shepherd. It turns out to be 11,500 years old, many thousands of years older than any other known human temple building, and apparently it is radically altering archeology’s understanding of the origins of human civilization.
December 21, 2009
The late Amelia Charlie, prominent designer and promoter of the Cowichan sweater
Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater (photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes).
November 13, 2009
Paris Shoes at 51 W. Hastings, in Vancouver, possibly 1919. Maybe if shoeboxes still looked this beautifully white you wouldn’t have to have salespeople constantly disappearing into the back. I somehow doubt that the uniform whiteness of this bank of shoe boxes could every happen again, though, and if it did it would be twee rather than pure utility.
November 11, 2009
My grandfather landed on a Normandy beach on D-Day when he was 35 years old. He was a Canadian officer on loan to a British regiment, so he landed with the British on Sword Beach rather than with the Canadians on Juno.
September 10, 2009
Apologies for my continuing semi-absence from this blog. I appreciate your patience and I thought you might enjoy this sign from one of the crafts stalls at the Ferry terminal between Vancouver and Victoria.
September 8, 2009
Things for the homemade space station where we’ll live in some sort of harmony and wear space rags.
August 13, 2009
This is the paper-based pavilion designed by Arthur Erickson for the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements that took place in Vancouver in June of 1976. The pavilion, part of Habitat’s exhibit, was erected in front of the old courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).
May 5, 2009
On a trip with friends to the west coast of Vancouver Island one summer, I found a tin “Holly Hobbie” mug that had washed up on shore. The next morning I showed it to my friend Jonathan, who was cooking us breakfast.
