New Media

I’ll be playing tourist in my own city this weekend. We’ll likely wander down to Cafe Artigiano, the Vancouver Art Gallery or Canada Place at some point, but we’d also like to try out something new. Any suggestions for hidden gems of locales or activities in downtown Vancouver on Saturday? I’ll probably have my camera with me, just so you know.

No hiking suggestions, please. Stanley Park is always nice and we’ll get there when the weather warms up a bit, but we’re not very out-doorsy. Cheers.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not so happy about my city turning into a shooting gallery for gangsters with stupid grudges and poor marksmanship.

The latest tragedy was entirely preventable, if our judges would simply use existing sentencing options to lock up the bad guys instead of setting them free on bail.

Revolving door justice is not doing us unarmed civilians any favors.
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As a guy who can’t watch any sport for more than 5 minutes without yawning, I have sympathy on a gut level with those who knock the 2010 Winter Olympics as a surreal waste of resources.

But I also recognize that the vast majority of Canadians do like sports in general and that there are significant benefits for hosting a sporting event like the Olympics specifically. Nebulous benefits like “putting the city on the map” can actually translate into tourism dollars supporting local workers. Getting the attention of the world puts pressure on higher levels of government to pour money into our area to build infrastructure that otherwise would have no chance of existing. Creating jobs and building venues for sports activities that many people seem to enjoy are not bad things.

There’s a sense amongst anti-Olympics protesters that in a zero-sum game of government spending, any dollar spent on the Olympic oval, for instance, is a dollar that doesn’t go towards, say, feeding the homeless. But that ignores the fact that a lot of this money from higher levels of government wouldn’t have gone to anything if the Olympics wasn’t in town.

Secondly, you could apply the spending argument to anything; why spend dollars on roads and bridges when you’ve got people sleeping in the alleys in the downtown eastside — or Kitsilano? Striking a budget balance where all priorities get what they need is an art, not a science.

Are our priorities wrong on this? Given that we’re not contemplating an Olympics that even comes close to the titanic spending for the Beijing games ($42 billion, in a country where a good proportion of the population still lives in grinding poverty), I don’t know that our spending on the Olympics is a problem. But I’d love to hear from readers.

This rally by Toronto’s Pashtun community is an encouraging and inspiring effort by friends of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee and supporters of human rights in Afghanistan:

TORONTO – Pashtun-Canadians of Pakistan and Afghanistan origin are organizing an anti-Taliban rally to protest the ongoing massacre of Pashtun people in Northern Pakistan by the Taliban. In our first ever anti-Taliban rally in Canada we are protesting outside Queen’s Park to highlight the unreported “Genocide of 52 million Pashtuns” by the Taliban and militants.

The once peaceful and serene Swat Valley in northern Pakistan has now being transformed into another Afghanistan by the Taliban. While hundreds of innocent people have been beheaded and butchered, 300 educational institutions have been bombed and destroyed, people on ground perceive that the Pakistan ISI/military is supporting Taliban because of the infectivity of the operation and intentionally fanning extremist religious thought in the region. Out of the 1.7 million local population about 700,000 people have already forced to migrate to other areas by the war.

We want to educate and apprise fellow Canadians, the Canadian media and journalists of this unreported genocide by the Taliban, who are massacring Pashtuns in the name of Islam. We are urging Canadian newspapers and TV networks to send photographers, videographers and reporters to talk to hundreds of Pashtun women, children and men whose family members are being killed in Pakistan’s Pashtun areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Date: Sunday February 15, 2009 Time: 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM Location: Ontario Legislative Building , Queen’s Park, Toronto.

For information call Inayat Khan Kakar (905) 277 2854 – (647) 895-6566
Canadian Pashtun Community 315 Elgin St N, Cambridge, ON, N1R 8C9

You’re about to find out 25 Things about Me (thanks to a meme tag from my friend and fellow Vancouver blogger, David Drucker).

1. My last name is a shortened form of Narovlansky. Or so I’m told.
2. I believe Canada has a role to play in promoting human rights and freedom abroad. You, too? Sign this pledge and join me.
3. I play chess with social media genius Joe Solomon most weekends and lose just about every time.
4. I’ve worked as a writer in some form or another since 1999. My first article as a paid journalist was for this plucky little newspaper in my hometown. I think I was covering a trade fair in Brandon.
5. I met the love of my life over six years ago and plan to happily spend at least the next 66 years with her, assuming the timely intervention of medical science.
6. I’m a fan of Sean Orr‘s Morning Brew at Beyond Robson. There’s something about hyper-local hyper-cynical.
7. I write a column about Vancouver’s sustainability scene for a local magazine.
8. I am inspired by the work of a BC-based human rights consultant, Lauryn Oates, who was blacklisted by the Taliban at the age of 14.
9. I enjoy discussing politics and current affairs for hours on end with the encyclopedic workaholic superman and journalist Ian King and the poetic and most earnest Canuck, Lyle Neff, usually over many pints of draft.
10. I know way more about social media and IT security than you might think, but still have a lot to learn before anyone calls me a guru.
11. My wife and I celebrate the month-iversaries of our first meeting in a cafe and our wedding day every month without fail. We even have a song.
12. I hang out with a cool guy who speaks seven languages (or more. I’ve lost count), has a photographic memory and includes “fashion model” and “environmental consultant” on his resume. I speak, of course, of the super-blogger Hummingbird604.com. Raul is cool.
13. Back in high school, my favorite comic books were the Incredible Hulk and the Swamp Thing. I liked my heroes monstrous and misunderstood.
14. I’m proud to call best-selling author and tireless journalist Terry Glavin a friend and comrade. If you ever see me waving a socialist flag amidst the vanguard of the workers’ revolution against the powers that be, you’ll know who to thank.
15. I chew at least a pack of gum a day.
16. I like ska music. Fuzzcat ROCKS!
17. I have worked on political campaigns, but I’ve never been a signed member of any political party.
18. I’ve attended the Covenant Zone.
19. I’ve seen the inside of a tunnel dug by the North Koreans beneath the DMZ to facilitate an invasion of the South.
20. I can quote virtually any line of Sex in the City dialogue five seconds before it happens.
21. When I play Civilization, I never start wars, but I always finish them.
22. My favorite film is Barton Fink.
23. I don’t spend nearly enough time with Michael Klassen, one of Vancouver’s smartest commentators on local politics, urban planning, communications trends and much else besides.
24. I’ve shaken hands and had a brief conversation with Prince Charles of England.
25. I love the life I share with my wife and I’m grateful every day for the chance to live with her in the best city in the greatest country on the face of the Earth.

Since I try to keep my spamming of friends and colleagues to a minimum, I will not be passing on this 25-Things meme. On the other hand, my readers are free to assume they are “tagged” by reading this post, if they are so inclined. Cheers.