I also enjoyed the headline:

Click on the extract to read in its entirety.

Anakana Schofield masters madness in Malarky

 

“Madness is one of fiction’s most enduring subjects, but it requires some finesse in order to be done justice. You can’t just push a character off the cliff of mental health and then catch up with them at the bottom. That’s cheap, and uninteresting besides. The real challenge is to document what happens to that person, second by second, on their way down—because no two falls are exactly the same.

This helps explain why Malarky, the debut novel from Anakana Schofield, an Irish-Canadian author and critic who calls Vancouver home, stands head and shoulders above many of its peers. And she’s got competition: in 2012 alone we’ve seen Ross Raisin’s Waterline, about the rapid self-destruction of a middle-aged Glaswegian widower, and Amelia Gray’s Threats, a chilling, stylized exercise in mood and faulty memory. Both of these books are very good, but Schofield’s is better.”

He’s been a respected B.C. lawyer, judge and attorney-general, and now, it seems, he’s embarking on a brief movie career.

As first reported by Stephen Hui in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight, Oppal has a cameo in the new film by Uwe Boll, a director who, with credits like Postal, Blubberella and House of the Dead to his credit, is billed as the world’s worst filmmaker.

His new film is called The Bailout, and it concerns a New Yorker (played by Prison Break‘s Dominic Purcell) who loses everything in the 2008 financial crisis and then goes absolutely postal on investment bankers in a series of targeted killings.

As Metro Vancouver tells it, Oppal is to appear as a stockbroker who gets shot by the film’s main character. He’ll be playing alongside Bruce Langereis, president of Vancouver’s prominent Delta Lands Development Ltd.

All of this would seem pretty innocuous if Oppal weren’t also the lead commissioner of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, which is investigating the events surrounding a series of murders carried out by serial killer Robert Pickton on prostitutes working Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The inquiry has been fraught with problems, from questions over public funding for legal counsel, to concerns about how it’s being conducted to its executive director being placed on leave.

But before the commission even began, there were questions around whether Wally Oppal would be the right man for the job. He did, after all, serve as attorney-general, offered input as to whether such an inquiry should be held to begin with, and now he’s been appointed the task of providing recommendations to the B.C. Liberal government, the very party that made him a cabinet minister.

While a starring role in a Uwe Boll picture likely won’t disqualify him as an inquiry commissioner, Oppal’s appearance in a joke-y film about a serial killer nevertheless raises a few questions about how seriously he’s taking his job.

(Photos by Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun; Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun; Handout, Rotten Tomatoes)

Beatles Burlesque, with Miss Kiss, Miss Fitt, Blue Morris, and Connie Cahoots (clockwise from left).

Published in the Georgia Straight.

Unless you’ve been living with your head in the proverbial sand for the past several years, you’re well aware by now of Vancouver’s torrid love affair with burlesque—that winking, twinkling paramour that swept the city off its feet sometime in the latter half of the ’90s. Evidence of this passionate romance can be seen pretty much everywhere, from the fliers plastered all over Granville Street, advertising various classes and weekly theme nights, to the myriad shows themselves, found everywhere from East Van to Yaletown.

By far, though, the best evidence of Lotusland’s intimate relationship with burlesque is its annual celebration of the prismatic subculture with the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, now in its seventh year. But why does burlesque hold such an esteemed place in Vancouver’s rain-drenched heart?

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“What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

Henry David Thoreau

One thing that scares me is the talk about building an incinerator in the Fraser Valley to burn Greater Vancouver’s waste. Reading an article from the Georgia Straight  about it really woke me up http://www.straight.com/article-300715/vancouver/garbage-incineration-plan-under-fire. Another article worth reading “Two sides of garbage incineration” – 2003 talks about the incineration debate further http://www.csetoronto.org/perryarticlestar.htm. At the time of publication Toronto was shipping its garbage to Michigan.

The thought of incineration is motivation to refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. If they are going to burn my trash it will be the smallest amount possible.

I’m adding this picture just because it made me laugh…and my good friend gave me this pin recently. I have been wearing it. It’s even made out of metal. Maybe it should count for my Project 333 but for now it’s been living on my hoodie. I’m not worrying about it. Normally I wouldn’t wear something like this pin. It makes me laugh though!

Incineration bothers me. They try to make it sound great by using the term “waste to energy”. Makes it sound better, right? I’d rather have clean energy.

So when you see recyclables in the garbage remember that someone wasted their opportunity to make a difference. They are voting for pollution and waste.

What’s your vote for?

~Stephanie

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”

Japanese Proverb

“It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.” – Confucius

No, I’m not a 40-year-old smoker, however I like to define the exact pitch and tenor of my voice as “unsexy Scarlett Johansson.”

CKNW had me on yesterday to discuss the article I wrote for the Straight. Since I don’t have a specific recorded file for you, the interview can be found if you select 5pm on the drop-down menu, click “Listen” and then fast-forward to the 33-minute mark.

Link here.

Once again, to keep this relevant to the blog, I am about halfway through the last Kate Atkinson book (Started Early, Took My Dog) which is possibly the best one so far. Review to come!

Published in the Georgia Straight.

As soon as the White Stripes’ demise made heartbreaking headlines last February, hype for a Jack White solo album started feverishly brewing. Now that the damn thing’s finally here, we can all stop praying for that Raconteurs reunion. But don’t get too comfortable— Blunderbuss is not exactly an easy-listening affair. Since half of it can be summed up as an acrid letter bomb to the spectres of White’s recent past, the album is perfectly suited to its title, which, at its roots, means “thunder gun”. So why then does Blunderbuss have the same effect as a deflated birthday balloon?

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Published in the Georgia Straight.

Whether drifting over radio airwaves or a telephone line, Raine Maida’s voice is always distinctive: sort of rusty and red-blooded but known for reaching startling and effeminate highs in Our Lady Peace hits like “Superman’s Dead”. Speaking to the Straight about the band’s new album, Curve, Maida sounds a bit sapped, but his creative vision is more resolute than it has been for a long time. “This record is the one we’ve been trying to make for the past 10 years,” he says. “And it almost erases the last 10 years for me. It’s been a real reawakening for us.”

Maida admits to feeling that OLP lost its way with the last few albums before finding itself again with Curve, its eighth effort. “There were moments when we got caught up in the bullshit politics of, ‘Oh, we don’t hear a single here,’ and the artistic side of this band got put on the back burner,” he says with a sigh. “Now, we have more of a ‘fuck you’-ness where we’re confident as artists, and I don’t think we can be bullied around by labels or the business anymore.”

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Remember that fable? Nobody wants to be the first to say the emperor is striding around naked because they are afraid they are the only ones missing something, and feel obligated to agree with what everyone else is saying…

Okay, enough rambling.

Nicli Antica has been raved about for a while. The latest push I got to try it came from the Georgia Straight paper’s Golden Plates Awards, Readers’ Choice.

I was pretty excited about it. And as they say, pizza is like sex…even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

I can officially say it is possible to eff up pizza.

How? I don’t know. I don’t even cook, and I can throw some stuff on a crust and have it taste good. Somehow my $60 lunch (no booze) ended up displeasing two of us at once.

On the plus side: the place is pretty nice inside…trendy, stylish, what have you. Which I think is the reason people somehow feel like the food is actually better than it is…maybe?

Photo source: bcbusinessonline

The appetizer was pretty good too! Burrata cheese with some yummy stuff to accompany it.

Photo source: gastrophoria.blogspot.com — this is NOT the actual one we ate. And it’s not an egg — that’s burrata cheese.

Since the appy was so nice, we can be forgiven for expecting the pizza to wow us.

Okay, first off, I asked how big the things were because I really just wanted to split one (costly). The waiter said they were too small to share. Uh, yeah…maybe if you are a grizzly bear. They’re pretty damn huge. Way to make me spend more than I needed to.

So that kinda bugged me.

Anyway…garlic. I’m personally of the opinion a little goes a long way. But…apparently this place disagrees because they somehow felt it necessary and/or acceptable to put entire CLOVES on the thing, without chopping them at all. Entire cloves!

Speaking of not chopping… the pizzas (which were like nine or 10 inches across or something) were NOT CUT!! No slices! We had to use knife and fork to cut through a very tough crust. I hurt my hand a little, I kid you not.

I had the pesto. It sucked, frankly. There’s no other way to deny it. It was bland and oily, and it was hard to manoeuvre around the garlic (did I mention there were entire CLOVES on it?).

My guest had something involving some sort of meat…the restaurant’s website is too slow right now to wait for the menu to load to refresh my memory. Anyway, he was really disappointed, and I ended up eating his leftovers. The pizza was so hard the next day I nearly chipped a tooth. Unreal.

So, gotta disagree with all the hype here.

Having said that, of course I’d give it another go…until then…blech.

Published in the Georgia Straight.

Once upon a time (the early ’90s), Courtney Love was a deliciously vicious fuck-up alchemizing pent-up pain and feminist rage into some of the most compelling music of her generation. Flash forward to 2012 and Love is still fucked up, but to a cliff-dangling degree that has her inadvertently killing innocent animals and accusing Dave Grohl of seducing her 19-year-old daughter.

As reported by Gawker, Love went on a stream-of-consciousness Twitter tirade on Tuesday night via her private account @cbabymichelle, rambling half-coherently about a rumour she heard from “reliable sources” alleging that Grohl “hit on Frances” in the backseat of a car. In her priceless words, “it is inn [sic] fact a fact.” And in Ronald Reagan’s words, “Facts are stupid things”—when it comes to Love’s assertions anyway.

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Photo by Rebecca Blissett.

Published in the Georgia Straight.

When the Fox took to the Vogue Theatre’s stage on April 9 to introduce psychedelic electro-rockers Kasabian as the NME Awards’ “best British band”, it was like an emcee announcing a champion fighter. And though it was questionable as to whether Kasabian truly lived up to that title, these masters of starry-eyed, rock ‘n’ roll bravado staked out a pretty persuasive claim.

Kicking off the beer-saturated night with two of the band’s swashbuckling hits back-to-back—the Sergio Leone–esque “Days Are Forgotten” from its latest, Velociraptor!, and the masturbatory glam salute “Shoot the Runner”—frontman Tom Meighan and company were riding high on the crowd’s indulgent energy. Strutting back and forth from the frontline to his right-hand man, lead guitarist, and songwriter Sergio Pizzorno, Meighan spat out lyrics like bullets, singing defiantly, “You say I’m old hat/A fuckin’ dirty rat/Call me a cliché/How right you are.”

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Published in the Georgia Straight.

Blood Red Shoes walks a decidedly grittier and lonelier path than many of its indie contemporaries. On their third album In Time to Voices, officially unveiled last Tuesday, guitarist Laura-Mary Carter and drummer Steven Ansell favour dirty, crunchy guitars over shiny synths and beats and prefer achingly honest songwriting over pretentious posturing. This sets the English alt-rock duo apart, but their search for a solid identity is not over.

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Here’s a link to the piece, click on this quote from it below.

“it joins a long line of ambitious writing that turns the peculiarities of Irish life into a mirror for the world.”

Published in the Georgia Straight.

On Tuesday, the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne continued to fly the band’s freak flag proudly, announcing in an interview with MTV Hive that he’s been collecting the blood of recent collaborators.

Coyne and co. have been cooking up a double album of collabs dubbed The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends for this year’s Record Store Day (April 21), the “fwends” including Bon Iver, Nick Cave, Chris Martin, Yoko Ono, and Ke$ha. Though his motives for facilitating Ke$ha’s unholy gatecrashing of the respectable music world may be unclear, Coyne did give some (literally) juicy details on the album’s packaging: “I’m going to put little bits of everybody’s blood in the middle of this record, like a glass specimen thing. I collected quite a few vials [already].”

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Today’s blog is to share my most visited websites. Everyday I’m looking for news to share at the social media accounts I manage, I’m always searching for useful and creative content to share. First I need to look for news that can be interesting for my target audience for example, in one account, I share everything related to education and I check for articles, videos or images students can find useful or entertaining. I use a lot of college gazettes or online journals and magazines because they have the latest news of what is going on at schools. I also look for local news, very often at online newspapers of our city. Usually I check: vancouversun.com, vancouverobserver.com, insidevancouver.ca, vancouver.24hrs.ca and straight.com among others. These sites also have useful event pages, which I share to students new to Vancouver. :)

Furthermore, for my personal sharing, I check StumbleUpon.com, Its no news site but for me is the best website to explore the internet according my interests. I always find useful things that I can share with my followers and friends. For social media news I visit Mashable as much as I can. :P

I’m very interested in crafts so I like to follow DIY and crafty blogs at Bloglovin’, I find Bloglovin’ very useful as it functions as a search engine. I also like to check Craftgawker.com, and decorhacks.com (a more girly approach in my day :P). For unique products I love Wanelo.com and If I’m looking for a particular product I go to amazon.com or ebay.com.

For entertainment, music, tutorials and reviews I always go to YouTube, I like to check the latest trailers, music videos, film and book reviews, TV shows promos, etc., and If I need to know how to do something I simply type it in and voila! Definitely YouTube is one of my favorites, I can spend hours there.

And, of course, the sites I check like a bazillion times a day are Twitter.com and Facebook.com, I just can’t get enough. Always useful tweets at my twitter home page :).

As you can see I visit a lot of websites everyday, these are the most popular ones (and the ones I remember for now). I hope you enjoyed this post and please let me know which websites do you visit everyday and why!  :).

Thanks for reading!!

Modelled after the societal ebbs of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, New Jersey and Atlanta, the show presents cartoonish depictions of ladies of leisure, whose obsession with physical appearances is only matched by their materialistic pursuits. In short, it’s kind of like watching the broads on Dynasty say vapid things and scratch each other’s eyes out, only with worse acting.

That said, it promises to be mildly entertaining, mostly ridiculous, heavily orchestrated reality TV like any other, except for the fact we used to be able to avoid said shows by changing the channel. With Real Housewives of Vancouver, however, it’s everywhere: the Vancouver Sun, Globe and Mail, the (sigh) front page of the Province, the website of the once hallowed Georgia Straight, radio stations, TV stations, blogs et al. All of which makes us wonder if the show even needs to advertise when it has Vancouver media doing it for them.

However, the most depressing thing is the series doesn’t even air until April. So we have another month of this overblown, promotional hype to endure.
It almost makes us want to pour another mimosa as we look out over our palatial Shaughnessy estate and book a second hot stone massage.

you will be missed!

Fresh off their Olympic-qualifying win against Mexico Friday night, the Canadians didn’t fare as well on Sunday, losing to a dominant U.S. team in the CONCACAF final 4-0. It wasn’t long before the knives came out, with the Georgia Straight’s online site using the headline: “USA destroys Canada…” and the Province, which rarely meets a hyperbole it doesn’t like, going with “Classic case of being… OUTCLASSED.” To its credit, the Province didn’t use the words “tragedy,” “killer” or “chicks” anywhere in its headline, which is a rarity. Heck, it even resisted the urge to run an editorial calling for the coach’s head or sending superstar Christine Sinclair to Tampa Bay in exchange for Vinny Lecavalier.

Regardless, congratulations to the Canadian women’s soccer team for qualifying for the London Olympics this summer. Now, can we all get back to whining, complaining and overreacting over the fortunes of the Canucks.

Now, we don’t want to diminish the hard work of the Straight’s headline writers, but it is beyond us why they decided to go with the humdrum headline “Power Surge” instead of the more obvious and, frankly, snappy “Lui Louie.” It seems like a no brainer: two people on the cover with the last names Lui and Louie, you go with “Lui Louie.” That’s one of the first things you learn in J-school. Just kidding, we didn’t go to J-school.

Sure, “Lui Louie” might mislead readers into thinking they’re going to read a glowing profile of Vancouver’s new “it” couple, but when the headline gods shine on you, you accept their offering. Anything else and you’re just asking for trouble. It would be like having a story about a knitting group for empty nesters and not calling it “Knit without my daughter.” It would be like profiling a tugboat operator who also sells imported Persian rugs and not using “Rug and Tug.” It would be like having a news item on Mike Reno’s liver transplant and never even uttering the phrase “Liverboy” or writing about a controversial penalty assessed to Canucks forward David Booth and squelching the chance to use “Boothy call.”

Better luck next time, Georgia Straight, when a potential cover story on female Tex-Mex food cart operators provides you with a wealth of options. May we be so bold as to suggest any of the following: “Taco belles,” “Taco to the hand,” “Taco-ing heads,” “Taco care of business” or, wait for it,  “Whatchu taco-ing about, Willis?”