New Media

Congratulations to the world’s tallest man, Bao Xishun, on his marriage this week to hometown girl Xia Shujian. On the other side of the world, the 7’9″ herdsman from Inner Mongolia has tied the knot in a traditional ceremony at the tomb of Kublai Khan.

His 5’6″ wife has surely already gotten used to a bitterly sore neck from gazing up at her beloved.

It’s getting close to my own second wedding anniversary. Just as China’s famous newlyweds must feel a little mismatched on occasion, I sometimes wonder at my wife’s decision to agree to marry clumsy-skinny-hairy-old-me. I may never make it into the Guinness World Records book, but I’m a very lucky guy, all the same.

Happy pre-anniversary, baby! We’re just getting started.

Mark Twain – No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

We may be closer to nature in Canada’s green jewel on the west coast, but the latest numbers just don’t back up all of our environmentally-friendly pretensions.

Just 23 per cent of Vancouver homes compost, 4 per cent less than the national average and a whopping 17 per cent less than in Victoria (yeah, island dwellers have even more reason to manage their environment carefully, but still…). The numbers on switching over to lower-energy light bulbs is comparatively better.

The City of Vancouver has a great website and community engagement vehicle for tips about how to make little changes to your lifestyle to help save the planet. Planet huggers can check out One Day for more information.

Keep it clean, keep it green.

(The video above shows Lois of Family Guy cartoon fame stumbling on a fabulous idea for generating financial support for environmental initiatives)

Canada is sending a flotilla of patrol ships to guard our sacred Arctic watersagainst… Denmark?

Granted, if global warming ever unleashes the vast treasure trove of raw resources that is our northern frontier, we might have a little more competition to deal with. And in that case, our hold on the new Northwest Passage will pretty much depend on a simple lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Russian and American blue water navy sailors to freeze their naughty bits.

There is a case to be made for sending a token force up to secure our country’s territory. Strangely, those who disparage the cost of the mission are often the same people who condemn our creeping loss of sovereignty to our southern neighbor.

In any case, let’s keep our country safe from the Vikings and other scourges of the high seas. If anyone is going to freeze their extremities off for ice-encased oil and diamonds in a region clearly unfit for most human beings, it better be us.

Microsoft is setting up shop in Vancouver. Who knew the brain drain could work both ways?

Thanks, American immigration bureaucrats. If you don’t want to give green cards and work visas to smart and talented people, we’ll happily take them over here.

Just one more addition to Vancouver’s high-tech cluster. Keep ‘em coming!

Even before the United Kingdom handed Hong Kong back to China ten years ago, jittery residents of that plucky capitalist (but by no means democratic) outpost packed up and set up new digs on the other side of the Pacific Rim in Vancouver.

I’m glad they did. For one, if they hadn’t, I never would have met my wife. On a less selfish note, her family was part of the wave of immigration by educated, hard-working, entrepreneurial people who have helped transform Vancouver from a sleepy Victorian-Canadian burgh into a thriving multicultural metropolis.

Meanwhile, it seems as though everyone’s predictions about the fall of Hong Kong following the handover are best extremely premature and at worst just plain wrong. The one country, two systems arrangement is working out pretty well. Hong Kong’s democrats aren’t any closer to electing their local representatives ten years on, but commentators likely would have said the same thing if the Brits had somehow extended their stay. Meanwhile, its economy is still humming along. Perhaps it isn’t quite the land of opportunity it was before, but that seems to have more to do with the low cost of labor in the mainland than any sort of communist regulations.

In any case, China’s loss has absolutely been Canada’s gain. As we celebrated the 140th birthday of the Canadian nation on the west coast, we’re reminded once again of how great this country really is, thanks to people from across the ocean who have chosen to be a part of it.