I’ve been a Monty Python fan for years, and the thing that drew me in was Monty Python and the Holy Grail [wp].  Like most good nerds I could recite complete passages of the film from memory, having watched it more times than anyone should ever watch any film.  Later I’d get into the show through the audio recordings, then eventually renting the VHS tapes of the BBC show. 

Yet I was oddly unwilling to pay good money to see Monty Python’s Spamalot.  Some of it was that of all the Pythons Eric Idle, the driving force behind Spamalot, had always been my least favorite of the group and had always seemed the most willing to cash in on the group’s fame no matter how tacky. 

And tacky it is, though in the glorious tacky manner that both embraces and mocks its translation from low budget film to Broadway musical.  In a lot of ways this is a meta-musical, playing with the form the same way that the movie played with the form of movie theatre.  Songs such as “Diva’s Lament” and “You Won’t Succeed On Broadway” are often less about the plot, than about the fact that a musical is going on.  Some songs are slightly altered versions from the movie, while Idle brings “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” in from Life of Brian to help fill the show out.

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I was downtown outside of the Central Branch of the library when I, and pretty much everyone else on the sidewalk, spotted two women who began rappelling down the side of the library’s main building.  After a moment they stopped and began doing a few acrobatic stunts, mostly flips.

They seemed to be mainly practicing, but there was no signs up saying where they were from or what they were doing and lacking a really tall ladder I wasn’t able to get up there and ask them what was up.  I did take a few moments worth of video of their aerial dancing which is on my Flickr account [fkr].  (I also put it on YouTube [yt] but the quality is so shitty there.)

If anyone has the inside scoop as to who they are, and what they were doing let us know in the comments.

Update:Commenter Canadianveggie says that, “My guess is that it is Aeriosa Dance Company. They have pictures on their website of performance they’ve done at the library before.”

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You may not believe this (or care), but out of the 11 years I’ve lived in Vancouver, I’ve never once been to the PNE. I’ve driven past it. That’s about it. Being pan-Canadian, my formative years had me slowly moving East, and the temporary, Summer fairs just got bigger and better, until I landed in Calgary, and say what you will, that Stampede is one crazy week.

So once settled in Vancouver, I enjoyed the relative calm of not having July explode in a frenzy of cowboy hats and pancake batter.

Oh, sure, I’ve learned the nicknames (”pee-on-your-knee”) and heard about Playland, but reports of it were kind of like listening to an insane person; “I bought myself a cell phone number and an elderly Chinese couple told me it was a very lucky number and then ate a corn dog while waiting in line to be shot into space! Then that night, The Tragically Hip performed exactly where I had watched dogs jump through hoops the week before!”

But any trepidation I may have had is wearing off - maybe it’s because I haven’t been to a Stampede (or any sort of fair ground) in a decade. Maybe it’s because I know people with kids, and darned if they (the kids) don’t make it sound fun. Maybe it’s because I know the guys that have been designing the Playland ads for years. Whatever the case, I think it might be time.

But what should I plan for?

I know MetBlog should ideally be about telling you, dear reader, what’s what. Fine. Kid Rock is playing this Sunday - get your tickets now! But I can only read the website so much - I need the skinny, the inside track. What is a must-ride attraction? What’s the must-eat food? What’s the best time to go if you hate crowds (and boy, do I)? Help me out, won’t you - share your wisdom in the comments.

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Let’s face it, most teams after missing the playoffs would spend the off-season making the team stronger, and building on the strengths that they did have.  Replace the GM?  Sure.  Replace the GM with your star player’s agent?  Okay, sure, kind of icky and incestuous but okay.  Make your star’s agent the GM and then lose the star to free agency?  That’s fucking top notch dinkwallet behaviour.

So here it is, five reasons why 2008-2009 will be a year to forget for the Vancouver Canucks.

1. No Trevor Linden: he may not have been the on-ice force that the Canucks needed these last few years but he was the sort of leader who could help shape the attitude of a team, and bring in the wins.  His retirement is an unquantifiable blow to the team.
2. Mike Gillis:  Let’s face it even if bringing in Mats Sundin would have been a good move, making the move so public was only going to lead to heartache.  Not talking about players until they’re actually signed would be a good first move.  Talking about how awesome you are is generally a good way to look like a putz.  Look at the Canucks official news site and you’ll see that nearly half the stories are about who the team would like to have signed signed [vc].  It’s even more pathetic than my list of women I’d like to have slept with.  (Though with names like Anne Hathaway & Rachael Leigh Cook on the list, who’d call that pathetic?)
3. Roberto Luongo only plays one position: Cloning isn’t legal and Luongo isn’t going to score us goals.  He’s our best goalie, possibly ever, but let’s face it we need an offense.  Of course suggestions that we trade him for a goal scorer are insane, I mean shit doesn’t anyone remember the history of the last five years?  Goalies can win games too, and you need one in the playoffs.
4. Everyone else in the West is actually good: If you’re going to making lots of mistakes, it’s always good to be in a division where everyone else are making mistakes.  The West is too focused and too difficult for the Canucks to continue to be run like a Punch and Judy show. 
5. We drafted twins: Seriously identical Swedish twins and after years of having them we still haven’t come up with any crazy twin-centric plays.  Any other team would be having them change jerseys, call each other by different names and secrelty switching one of them with the goalie to build some kind of Might Ducks style play.  Maybe we should have hired Emilio Estevez for our GM.

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It’s the turn of the century.  We’re all worried about whether or not our computers are about to crash and making jokes about “Hanging Chads” when known idiot George W. Bush wins the US Presidential Election to become the actual President of the US of A.  Thankfully as we all know it’s not like he’s going to be called onto handle a crisis or make any real decisions, right?

They year 2000  was a great year for Mats Sundin, the sort of year that any team in the NHL would have been wise to sign him to a lucrative contract and build a team around him.  A franchise player he’d have really been a big score for the Canucks to sign in the year 2000.

So it’s sort of a hilarious turn of events that eight years later, at the age of 37, he turned down a big money offer from the Canucks [vs].   That doesn’t mean it couldn’t possibly happen, but then why exactly would we want it to?  Didn’t we learn from the Mark Messier thing that bringing in a big money player in the latter stages of his career and trying to shape the team around him, only leads to pain and sadness?

I suppose they figure with Mike Gillis at the helm and pain and sadness 100% guaranteed, we might as well get a big name signing in to sell some jerseys.  Face it, it was either that or redesign the uniform again.

How far have the Canucks slipped though?  This should be a great market to play in.  We’ve got weather, a strong dollar, a rather casual attitude towards celebrity that allows players to live more anonymously than in other Canadian markets and a fan-base that doesn’t expect anything except for pain and sadness.  It seems like the perfect destination.

Maybe if we offer him a carbon tax credit.

Update: Oh hey and now we lost Nausland [vc].  Wasn’t the the point of appointing his agent as our GM, to keep him?  Well at least there’s the Vancouver Giants.

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It’s kind of clever - diabolical even. Pick the one day everyone is outdoors walking around, pondering a hot dog and looking for the best spot to see fireworks, to launch the new provincial carbon tax on fuel sales! Brilliant! Oh sure, they’ll complain tomorrow, but day one will be buried under red and white flags, explosions in the sky, and photos of tots with ice-cream all over their faces (they may optionally also be looking at fireworks while holding tiny paper Canadian Flags.)

What does this mean to you? Do you have a car? If you’ve answered no, it means little to you, though in theory over time the tax will lessen personal and business taxes - time will tell on that. If you’ve answered yes, then it means from this day forward, you’re paying 2.4 cents per litre more for petrol - and that will increase another five and quarter cents per over the next four years, on top of wherever the price of oil takes us in the coming months.

Never has a hybrid looked so good, and the ZENN and Volt can’t go on sale fast enough! Save the petroleum for vital K-Way production, I say.

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Maybe you’ve been hearing about this Twitter thing, or maybe for you it’s old hat by now. Last week I explained how Twitter and the kindness of strangers helped me find my way when I got lost in Burnaby [mbv], and now I’d like to take a page from Blogging LA’s book [bla] and present a list of some great Twitter reads from Vancouver.

If you’re not quite clear on what Twitter is, or why you should care about it, check out this wonderful short video [cc].

1. Buzz Bishop [twt]: Vancouver radio personality and tech writer, Buzz is an active Twitterer and often uses the service to reach out to readers for ideas for his column in 24 Hours.
2. Sarah! [twt]: Sarah’s my fiancee’s roommate, and a very funny Twitterer.
3. Raul [twt]: There are different levels of Twitter frequency, and Raul certainly is active.  Following him on Twitter is kind of like following about three feet behind him wearing a long trench coat.  If you get my drift.
4. Tod Maffin [twt]: The CBC tech radio guy was of course an early adopter of Twitter, and still uses it regularly today to promote his work and share a bit of his personal life.
5. Vancouver Metblogs [twt]: Oh how tacky, I worked in a little self-promotion here.  That’s right, ten minutes before everyone abandoned Twitter for FriendFeed we totally set up a Twitter account for Metroblogging Vancouver.  With Vancouver specific updates, as well as notices of when we post something new it gives us that Web 2.0 street cred we crave.

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As we all celebrate Canada Day, I thought we’d take a slightly cheeky look at a fairly incomplete list of things that people feel make Canada what it actually is. These are things that define us, things that divide us and things this country into what it is.

Some of these things you might love about our nation, and others you might hate. Feel free to vote if you’re not from these parts as well, giving us an outsider’s perspective on how the world views Canada.

Choose wisely.

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So it’s Canada Day.  Hopefully you all have a great day.  If I were back in Kelowna I might make a note about boat safety, since basically all anyone does is drink and then go ride around the lake until the city shoots its fireworks off by the Okanagan bridge.

Of course once again Vancouver is going to have its own fireworks display [cdfw] with fireworks platforms on the water in both West Vancouver and Coal Harbour.  The fireworks start at 10:30 pm and while there’s a ticketed controlled area at Canada Place for watching them you can see them for free at a number of local spots, which I’ve listed below.

Barge 1: West Vancouver Barge

• West Vancouver Seawall from Ambleside to Dundarave
• The Stanley Park Seawall, West Side
• Kitsilano
• Jericho

Barge 2: Coal Harbour Barge

• Canada Place – a controlled access point - Tickets are sold through Ticketmaster. Net proceeds go to support the Strathcona Community Centre Food Security for Children Program.
• Harbour Green Park
• Stanley Park Seawall, East Side
• Harbour View Park, North Vancouver
• Lonsdale Quay

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Via David Drucker [lm]:

I knew Vancouver had it’s own fling with ’60s hippiness, and clearly we’re one of the most left-coast of the lefty cities on the continent even today, but I was completely ignorant of how much the ’60s and in fact a great influx of hippies had on the development of the city. From the fact that we don’t have a big freeway slashing its way through the heart of the city, to the formation of Greenpeace and even Vancouver’s current political believes all can be traced back to the Summer(s) of Love.

David Drucker found the video above on YouTube from Evening Magazine, a Seattle magazine style show, that demonstrates just how much the hippies shaped Vancouver.

It does seem quite jolly in the clip, but my uncle moved to Vancouver from Edmonton during this period of time and after getting further into a developing drug habit vanished forever. So while it turned out alright in for the city, it wasn’t without a few casualties. I also wonder how much of Vancouver current issue with IV drug abuse began to first develop during this period. Having grown up in the interior I know that the solution to most problems with the homeless, or drug users, is to just ship them to Vancouver.

Also I love how the narrator in the video says Kitsilano.

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Long time readers might have noticed that a lot of our regular posters have not been blogging around these parts much anymore. Even casual readers will notice that for a group blog having one author is a tad unusual. I won’t lie to you, I’m feeling a little lonely here at Vancouver Metblogs as I try to hold up the fort all on my own.

Which is why I’m putting the call out for authors. That’s right Metroblogging Vancouver is looking for new bloggers and you could be one of them.

What’s the catch? There is no catch. You just need to be able to blog twice-to-thrice a week about this great city of Vancouver. You also need to live in Vancouver, or the surrounding burbs, because let’s face it a Vancouver blog written by people in Calgary or Toronto would kind of suck.

So if you’re interested in being a part of the world wide project that is Metroblogging, then please send me an email [jefferysimpson at metblogs dot com] and come aboard. Whether your passion is blogging about local restaurants, other local blogs, parks, the Canucks, the Lions, riding the Skytrain or anything to do with Vancouver, we’d love to have you.

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*Note: Goldfish Pacific Kitchen seems to be reaching out to bloggers and food writers with offers of a $50 gift certificate in exchange for a restaurant review.  I took them up on this offer, and this is the meal that I ate.  Ideally you trust that I wouldn’t lie about a restaurant for $50, if you don’t well I have a long boring counter argument ready.

I’d always gotten the feeling that for the most part dinning in Yaletown was a bit of a trade off between style and substance.  Places and the food they serve can often feel more like they’re meant to be seen, not eaten and the prices don’t exactly go along way to making them welcoming.  Add to that Yaletown’s classically terrible parking situation and the fact that after about seven at night the Paris Hilton wannabes of Vancouver flood the area and you’d have a hard time convincing me that there were many reasonably priced places to eat offering really great food.

There are exceptions of course, for lunch I do like to eat at Phat [mbv],  but I was honestly surprised by Goldfish Pacific Kitchen [gfpk].  It manages to solve all of my Yaletown dining complaints by being reasonably priced, offering free lunch time valet parking and most importantly really good food.

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We’re about one hour away from the final of the European Championships. It’s Spain against Germany. It’s the beautiful sport of football (soccer) and the question of the day is, where are you watching it?

If I wasn’t trapped inside working I’d probably be heading over either to the Dover Arms on Denman or the Library Square Pub to catch the action. Had Italy made the final the obvious place to go would have been Commercial Drive, which would have been overcome with celebration had the Azzuri [wp] won.

Also on Denman near Georgia there’s a new snitzle resturant, the name of which escapes me, which looked like a good German place to be watching the final. Any other suggestions for those who might be wandering around trying to get a cold beer and a view of the match?

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twitter, originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

When I’m not blogging here, something that I’ve clearly not had time to do the past week, I’m generally Twittering. The thing is I’ve had an awful hard time explaining why Twitter could be useful to people. Oh sure there’s a whole bunch of Web 2.0 bullshit phrases like “branding” and “community building” that I can throw out but when talking with people in the real world (not online) it’s a lost cause.

Today however Twitter actually was a fairly useful service for me. I was invited to a social gathering. The thing was though I had directions I managed to completely missed seeing the giant BC Hydro building when I got off the Skytrain at Edmonds’ station. I wandered around the Burnaby suburbs for about twenty minutes and then started to panic.

I realized that I didn’t have the phone number for my hosts, or anyone else who would be there. Without GPS or Google Maps on my phone I Twittered “Lost on foot in Burnaby, help!” Following this I Twittered, “Seriously if anyone has Google Maps a hand would be nice.”

About two minutes later my phone rang and Mark Hamilton was on the line to give me directions using Google Maps. I don’t know Mark, I’d never talked to him online or offline before that call, but it got me back on track. So thanks Mark, and thanks Twitter.

See now that’s something I can use to explain the power of the Twitter. You know, because nobody but us nerds care about “crowd sourcing”.

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Apple 3G iPhone in Hong Kong, originally uploaded by Lawrence Wii.

Five reasons to fear the coming of the iPhone 3G:

1. Your iPhone is totally going to be lame now, loser.
2. Watching There Will Be Blood and driving may actually prove to be more dangerous than cell phone talking and driving.
3. Ted Rogers will soon have enough money to finish his doomsday device which he is calling, as per his usual naming methodology, Rogers Destrocto Beam.
4. Canada gets the “Jesus Phone” that means America now gets Jesus. The end times are near.
5. While trying to play the new Maroon 5 song you accidentally call your mother on her birthday. A three hour conversation filled with guilt and accusations results, teaching you never to try to listen to Maroon 5 again.
6. Bonus: You actually listen to Maroon 5.

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