18 January 2025 – Get ready. Tuesday is fast approaching.
And you have a cat shirt to prepare.
“Stand Up For My Country”
Posted by icelandpenny on 13 January 2025
https://icelandpenny.com/2025/01/13/stand-up-for-my-country/
Doctrine, Doorways & Details
12 January 2025 – First, “D” for the Everything, Everywhere Doctrine, which has set its targets for 2025: Greenland, Canada, Panama.
It is beyond alarming & insulting, it is surreal to hear the duly-elected incoming leader of a supposedly principled (and supposedly freedom-loving) country announce his intention to subjugate his neighbours — my country included.
Greenland he plans simply to buy, though upon questioning he explicitly does not rule out the use of military force. Canada he believes he can crush “by economic force.” Panama… well, the U.S. has a history of intervention in its southern neighbours, so there must be a long list of strategies already in the arsenal.
It is stirring, but not comforting, to read David Suzuki’s account (Toronto Star) of why he chose to return to Canada from the U.S. and why he hopes all Canadians “will fight to preserve our differences from [that other] great nation.” It is no comfort that some Americans (cf. this comment on my previous post by a Seattle-based reader) think that members of the incoming administration are “evil, twisted… and some are very stupid.” And it is no comfort to read that the subjugation plans are bound to fail (cf. Stephen Marche analysis, Maclean’s Magazine) since “at this point in history, America has come off 70 years of failed imperialist adventures.”
Even when the target nations are united and patriotic, even when the leaders of the aggressor nations are stupid and bungle their projects — even then — those projects still inflict great damage and suffering on the way through.
…
Shall we move on to a happier pair of D’s?
Doorways and Details
Fresh off a visit to a stunning exhibition in Equinox Gallery, I prowl my way back down this southern extension of Commercial Drive.
It is still home to vintage architecture and to small, independent shops and activities. Doorways are individual, and expressive.
This café with its door wide open…
and a collection of vintage bottles overhead.
This crafts workshop…
with its glorious live-edge door pull.
This café one block farther north, where the door may be physically closed but the signage welcomes you…
and a small notice apologizes for the need to bar pets…
and offers a free “puppiccino” in compensation.
An adjacent door, barred and locked, appears unfriendly, but is deceptive.
It guards something very friendly indeed, a tool-lending library — “an affordable community-based alternative to personal tool ownership or tool rental.”
Sadly, its window detail, hard to read through bars and glare, suggests neighbourly puppiccinos may become a thing of the past.
“How can you call this a development when the only thing going up is my rent.” Later I see land-acquisition notices in front of other vintage properties, citing CD-1 zoning, i.e. Comprehensive Development.
Another, much smaller doorway, this time near the north end of a narrow linear park threading its way parallel to Commercial Drive, on down to East Broadway.
One Little Free Library door, with two heart-warming details. First, the pointillist celebration of whales on the door…
and, second, the introduction to Harmonious Joan taped to the frame inside. (You don’t need to be a ukulele player, to be glad that people like HJ exist.)
One final “doorway” for you, and note those punctuation marks of uncertainty.
I debate its inclusion, and then decide that, yessiree! it qualifies. True, it is an intersection…
but are not intersections the doorway to a pair of streets?
Anyway the detail, another of the city’s sidewalk mosaics, deserves attention…
even if I cannot find a reference to it anywhere and so cannot identify it for you.
All these small things — ordinary, everyday, and worth defending.
Posted by icelandpenny on 12 January 2025
https://icelandpenny.com/2025/01/12/doctrine-doorways-details/
“Everything, everywhere…”
9 January 2025 — Current events flip my mind back 130 years, to an 1895 Punch cartoon, by Sir John Tenniel.
Master Johnny Bull asks, “Monroe Doctrine? What is the Monroe Doctrine?”
Master Jonathan (aka James Monroe) answers: “Wa-al — Guess it’s that everything everywhere belongs to us.”
In his December 2, 1823 address to Congress, President James Monroe articulated what was to be United States policy concerning the rest of the Americas.
“By the mid-1800s” — says the Office of the Historian, in its series Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations — “Monroe’s declaration, combined with the ideas of Manifest Destiny, provided precedent and support for U.S. expansion on the American continent…”
Posted by icelandpenny on 9 January 2025
https://icelandpenny.com/2025/01/09/everything-everywhere/
Jan. 1: Resolution Time
1 January 2025 – And what always tops the Resolution list?
Get more exercise.
Well… Vancouverites are on it already.
Yesterday, after my own get-some-exercise walk through Stanley Park and back toward town from Second Beach, I see this cluster of tents set up on the shores of English Bay.
Coming closer, I hear a deep-bass male voice doing sound checks, and then practising his “Happ-py new year, everybody!”
Coming right up to it, I see this is not prep for some dissolute New Year’s Eve blow-out. It is prep for a serious New Year’s Day feat of athletic endurance.
The annual Polar Bear Swim. Still underway as I write these words, but with years of tradition behind it.
Mind you, I’ve already had my own modest bit of exercise, this 1st day of the year!
Down to False Creek, just to say hello. Where there’s lots of exercise underway.
Including swimming.
All right, they do it year-round, but it counts.
As I follow that False Creek tributary through Hinge Park, I come to the playful little bridge connecting one side to t’other…
and then peer inside.
Where, at the far end, I see a father beginning to swing his little girl down-down-DOWN the steps to enter the bridge.
I meet them toward that far end.
She stamps her feet on the echoing deck, and giggles at me. I stamp my feet, and giggle right back at her. To her father’s vast amusement, she and I then have ourselves a foot-stamping contest. (And a giggle contest.)
Day 1 of a new year, and the exercise box is ticked!
Happy New Year, to you all.
Posted by icelandpenny on 1 January 2025
https://icelandpenny.com/2025/01/01/jan-1-resolution-time/
Raining Cats & Dogs
29 December 2024 – Also pandas & moo-cows & more, as I have yet to discover. All I know, before I set out, is that it is positively heaving down out there.
But I go out anyway, because, delightful as holiday sloth has been, it’s time to move my body.
Dripping tree against a sodden sky…
but happy ferns, in this front yard…
and happy winter moss on this tree, plus a cheerful ornament hung by some passing pedestrian.
The Vancouver Special is hunkered down, properly stoic — as it ought to be, here in its own native eco-system…
while the vintage green lampshade next door rises to the occasion, knowing it looks better in rain than sunshine.
Out on Main Street, a trio of pandas advertise dim sum…
a solitary cat advertises records…
three dogs advertise their very own bakery…
and an exceptionally silly cow (through this butcher’s doorway, left) advertises which succulent cuts come from which bits of her anatomy.
What is more dejected than a construction site in the rain? Not yet able to advertise the condo delights to come.
But this trio of guitars is warm & dry & a good advertisement for the magic of music…
especially Mr. Heavy Metal in the middle, whose tiny lettered plaque reads:
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
It’s all very swell, wonderfully diverting.
Nonetheless, I wish to point out that, after all this walking… it is still heaving down out here.
So I go home.
As I bring my dripping self through the door I envy, not for the first time, dogs’ ability to shake themselves dry.
Just look at that spiral shake!
But alas, we humans are not built like that.
So I do the next best thing.
I make myself a mug of spicy Mesoamerican hot chocolate.
(Recipes abound. Mine is 1 c. milk simmered with 1/2 tbsp honey, and a pinch each of ground ginger, cloves & cayenne; and then a generous 1/8 c unsweetened cocoa and bit of vanilla extract whisked in at the end.)
While I’m enjoying the drink — and wiggling my toes to extract maximum flavour — I read more about the long history of cacao & chocolate in Mayan and Aztec cultures.
Oh look, it is still raining. But I no longer care.
Posted by icelandpenny on 29 December 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/12/29/raining-cats-dogs/
The Tilt
21 December 2024 – Today is Solstice, 2024, and the tilt is the story. Twice a year earth’s axis pauses that breathless instant, and then begins to tilt in the opposite direction.
Where the tilt goes, so goes light: strengthening with Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere; ebbing with Summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere; giving all of us, whatever our hemisphere, reason to think about light.
I now define “light” very broadly, thanks to a friend who watched children at a Nutcracker performance dance in the aisles during intermission, and observed that light takes many forms, including delight and inspiration.
So I head out in the rain…
planning to walk my loop down-around the Cambie Bridge, and to see how much non-sunbeam light I may discover along the way. For example? Ohhh, whatever seems to provide us humans with inspiration, joy, energy, confidence, courage, resilience and the jolt of the delightfully unexpected.
Since all this is Inspired by my friend’s experience at the ballet, how fitting that my first observation is the window into the iDance studio.
It frames a scene warm with light, creativity, colour, and ways to live up to the studio’s motto, displayed on the back wall: “Don’t ever be too shy to dance your heart out.”
Down and around to the north/west…
and I’m closing in on Science World (L, above the fluorescent green-garbed pedestrian) and its mysterious clanking, whizzing tower of delights (R, with white struts, above the black-garbed cyclist). Still this far away, and I can already hear the sound effects.
Up close to the tower, people peer with fascination at the wondrous gizmos.
I finally decide to stop wondering, and find out. What is this?
I march into Science World and ask the Information Desk to tell me about the tower. Two people later, I learn it is called the Tower of Bauble, and yes it was recently restored, and yes, there is information on the website, and yes, here is contact information for Science World’s Director of Fun Times, who will be glad to tell me more.
I thank everyone for their help, promise to pursue this in January, and head back outside, in very good humour despite the still-pelting rain.
I start down Seawall along the north side of False Creek. Next to a marina building, with Plaza of Nations ferry dock on one side and BC Place Stadium on the other, I lean against a convenient pole under a convenient overhang, and spend a few minutes watching who is out there in all this weather — presumably bringing the light of satisfaction into their lives, as they pursue whatever it is they want to pursue.
In short order:
two runners…
two bicyclists…
two umbrella-ists…
and a motorcyclist.
Back into the rain — time to get on with my own chosen activity! — and more examples of what everybody else wants to do:
man and dog (and thrown stick), at play in the refurbished Coopers’ Park dog park..
passing ferries, at work and on schedule, their starboard and port lights flashing across the water…
three kayakers…
and, as I climbing the north-side ramp up to the Cambie Bridge…
an invitation to smile.
Off the bridge on the south side, heading east again — and more smiles.
It’s a whole convoy of determined walkers, setting themselves an impressive pace. The lead woman, first of all those yellow slickers, throws her arms wide in greeting as they approach.
There’s a place to obtain dog-waste bags, on the western edge of Hinge Park…
and, just a little farther along, a place to deposit your used needles.
(I remember the narcan-kit woman I met recently, and think that, oh yes, light in the darkness takes many forms.)
On Manitoba St. now, approaching West 4th., and I meet a pop-up crafts fair — “bringing [says the signage] the neighbourhood together by featuring local brands, artists & spaces.” Of course I go in.
I don’t buy anything, but I have some great conversations. “They just told me they’re not going to renew my studio lease,” says a potter. “That sucks, right? Except… I was kinda thinking I didn’t like that place any more. So it’s a good kick in the ass. Yah. It’s good.”
I meet Justine., and pause to talk some more. She is Justine Crawford, brand name Justine Crawfart (Crawf-art, get it?), with a selection of note cards that reflect her Asian heritage on her table…
and…
a Western magpie on her tummy.
It really is spectacular! I promise her a copy of the picture; she grins; we chat a bit more, and I’m away.
Fresh new winter moss decorates a tree on Ontario near 5th Ave., and a 2018 VMF mural (by Phantoms in the Front Yard) still decorates the building wall opposite.
Pretty soon I’m home, shaking off wet clothes.
It was a rain-pelting walk, and full of the light I like best — laughter and conversation and physical activity and creativity and surprises and curiosity both satisfied and slated for follow-up.
Sunbeams not needed.
Then, an hour later…
sunbeams all over the place.
May we all have light in our lives — received, created, shared. Of every kind.
Happy solstice.
Posted by icelandpenny on 21 December 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/12/21/the-tilt/
Light in the Darkness
14 December 2024 – Search for “light in the darkness” quotes (whether through AI or your own adorably old-fashioned skills) and you’ll find this concept transcends time, place, culture and activity. It is one of the great human concerns, one of our core needs and comforts.
As we approach Winter Solstice, here in the Northern Hemisphere, I am particularly alert to the absence of light.
And to its presence.
Two examples, both unexpected.
The Banner
Yesterday, by 5:30 pm, the sky has long been fully dark. I walk toward Ray Saunders’ local clock, our Mount Pleasant clock, and it sparkles with lights. Well, I know about that. I’ve already shown you the clock by night. Yesterday, for the first time, I notice the banners by night.
Remember the banner I included, in my tribute to Raymond Saunders, horologist? This one…
Now look at one of these banners, by night.
Light in the Darkness.
The Angel
I don’t go around expecting angels. Especially not today, late afternoon, standing slightly dazed in a London Drugs check-out line. The young woman in front of me is just part of the context: mid-20s perhaps, slightly chubby, tattoo’ed & lip-pierced & leather-jacketed, and somehow wrapped in friendly calm rather than line-up boredom.
Suddenly a clerk mutters an apology and reaches around me to hand her a neat oval cylinder. “I found one!” she exclaims. The young woman shines with joy. “Oh, this is wonderful! Thank you!” she cries and clips the case to a ring on her jacket.
I cock my head. She hasn’t paid for it. And she’s not being furtive about it — she’s about to pay for something else, but this item, she has simply appropriated. She sees me looking at her, and smiles.
So I ask. And she explains.
“It’s narcan.” I am still puzzled. “For drug overdoses.”
Now I understand, and my next question is obvious: “Do you do street patrols? Alley patrols?” She gives a self-deprecating little shake of the head. “No, no. But I grew up in East Van, I live in East Van, so I always carry a kit, you know? Today I came out without one. I’m so glad she found one for me — I don’t like not being ready.”
Later, at home, I look it up. I learn narcan = Naloxone = an injectable antidote for opioid drug poisoning. In 2012, the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control launched its Take Home Naloxone Program, which provides training and kits via drug stores and other distribution centres province-wide. The kits are available without prescription, and are free to “people at risk of an opioid drug poisoning and people likely to witness and respond to a drug poisoning.”
Standing there in the drug store, I don’t know about this program. But I do know the importance of what this young woman has taken upon herself to do, as part of her daily routine.
She’s turning to go, and I tap her arm. “I don’t believe in angels,” I begin, “not in ethereal beings. But people like you… you’re my idea of angels.”
She gives a little whufff of amazement, and then says, “Could I hug you?”
We hug.
Light in the darkness.
Posted by icelandpenny on 14 December 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/12/14/light-in-the-darkness/
Balcony Peekaboo
2 December 2024 – Fog & sun & withdrawals & advances & teases & full glory.
And a few crows.
Let’s set a benchmark. Let’s pick the view on November 28, when the weather chose to beam her sparkling charm in all directions. At 8:08 am, the rising sun bounced off east-facing towers…
and flooded downtown Vancouver, the North Shore and those Coast Mountains with light.
This morning — and, at 8:26, only minutes later in the day — the view is very different.
Fog. With about a block and a half of visibility. As for mountains… What mountains?
A crow waits it out.
Bit of a breakthrough, at 8:50…
largely withdrawn, by 9:41…
though a new line of light opens up at 9:48…
and tempts this crow (presumably equipped with GPS) to take flight on eastward.
His instincts are good.
By 10:37 the clouds are wispy and the haze is beating a retreat.
At 2:52 pm, it’s full sunshine, everywhere you look.
Look while you can. Sunset is barely an hour away.
Posted by icelandpenny on 2 December 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/12/02/balcony-peekaboo/
Ray Saunders, Horologist
30 November 2024 – Vancouverite and, more to the point, horologist Raymond Saunders died one week ago today, age 84. I want to pay my own small tribute because, multiple times most days, I walk by one of his creations. It is part of my neighbourhood, and therefore part of my life.
This is the Mount Pleasant Welcome clock, which he was commissioned to design and build in the late 1980s as part of the uptick then underway in the neighbourhood.
But it is not the clock for which he is best-known.
This one is.
Residents and tourists alike, we know this clock: the Gastown Steam Clock. In the mid-70s, Saunders, already an experienced horologist, was asked to design and build a clock to camouflage a steam vent at the corner of Water and Cambie streets in the Gastown district of downtown Vancouver.
The result, unveiled in 1977, was 16 sculptured feet of bronze & copper designed to reflect the buildings around it. For the first ten years the clock was indeed steam-powered (perhaps, but perhaps not, the first steam-powered clock in the world). Since then it has run on electricity, though the whistle…
emulating an 1890s steam locomotive whistle, is still really-truly powered by steam.
Obituaries and other articles and videos (click here, and take your choice) tell us he designed and built more than 150 customized clocks world-wide, often in equal part art works but always functioning clocks as well. I’m charmed to know, for example, that his Scenic World Steam Clock, installed in Katoomba Australia, commemorates coal miners and their pit ponies — and, to mark the hours, plays Waltzing Matilda.
Our local clock is much less grand…
but it reflects this neighbourhood, bearing not only the Vancouver coat of arms…
but sprigs of hops as well. After all, this was, and is again, the Brewery District.
The clock’s image, like the physical clock, is part of who we are. You see it incorporated into shop signage…
and on sidewalk banners….
and in my own Winter Solstice blog post, last 21 December…
when I stood patiently in front of the clock, waiting to photograph it at exactly 7:27 pm — the exact moment of solstice, Pacific Time. While my theme was the phenomenon of the solstice, not the clock or its creator, I naturally turned to this clock to make my point.
The obits tell us that Ray Saunders was still fixing clocks and advising collectors world-wide right to the end. They also tell us he was still playing poker right to the end. His last game, with friends, took place last Saturday.
It’s just perfect, isn’t it?
Posted by icelandpenny on 30 November 2024
https://icelandpenny.com/2024/11/30/ray-saunders-horologist/
Walk, Talk, Rock… B.C.-style
Since 14 August 2014
WALKING WOMAN 