Archive for May, 2011

SCENE AND HEARD showcases the independent music scene here in Vancouver.With 25,869+ artists, boasting 118,547+ tracks, the CBC Radio 3 web site is the absolute ultimate authority, and the home, of independent music in Canada. With that massive library along with tools for members (free to join!), we’re taking advantage of what they’ve set up by bringing you a fresh batch of music every week featuring local groups who have tracks (entire albums, even!) on the R3 site.

Hello from Washington! I’m at the Gorge for Sasquatch 2011…but soon I’ll be back in Vancouver on to a CITY festival, specifically Music Waste. I’m super stoked for this festival, so many great bands are playing including the uber talented Kingdom Cloud. In honor of this, we asked them to put a playlist together for us so here it is! Check it out below and check them out Saturday at Pat’s Pub…

Did you know that Tommy Chong used to co-own a nightclub in Vancouver? It was called the Blues Palace (or the Blue Balls, depending which interview you read.) Located on the corner of Broadway and Alma in Vancouver, the space had been called the Alma theatre before Chong bought it. Now it’s a mall that houses, among other things, a coffee shop and a sports supply store.

Full circle: Fortune Sound Club co-owner, GMAN, and Tommy Chong, sometime in the 80′s. Photo courtesy GMAN.

True story.

Play On 2011 is back again this year June 11th and 12th, once again at the lower mainland’s largest parking lot, Metrotown!  Team VIA will be avenging our loss of last year trying to recapture the coed division title.  Throughout the next week I’ll be introducing you to the VIA team and providing updates during the tournament.

Today I bring you…..Me!

Photo: Angela Ling

Yes….me!  If I can quote my grandfather, the best way to describe my game play is ‘Run around like chicken….wif no head!’  I’m also known for hammering slapshots in practice even though raising your stick above your waist is disallowed in our division.  Grandpa was onto something…..

Every day we share a single photo from our Flickr Pool shot by one of our faithful and talented readers (that’s you!).

Noticed a lovely photo today that kind of transitions nicely from yesterday’s post. In that post, Larissa offered a breath-taking view of Stanley Park and the Lions Gate Bridge through the window of a small aircraft. In the photograph by A-Top below, we find ourselves looking out the window of a larger aircraft (or perhaps a terminal) on the tarmac at YVR.

Now, I don’t discriminate against digital photography – I use a combo of film and digital cameras myself – but the quality of detail present in a medium format negative is absolutely remarkable. Here is Desolate in Company.

Gary

A new kitty twice a week! Yup, we want YOUR cat photos and stories! Click here to find out how your cat can appear on Van City Kitty.

VIA reader Sarah Johnson sent in her two sweet girls, Sally and Terrance. Their deets below:

Name: Sally & Terrance Breed/Colouring: Domestic Shorthairs, Grey Tabby & Black Hood: Dunbar, though they never go outside. There are too many coyotes out there. Habits: Sleeping all day, picking on each other, chasing own tail (Sally), lap sitting (Terrance). Hangouts: Laps, waste paper baskets and the top of the dining room bookshelf. Other info: The girls are littermates who we adopted from VOKRA in 2005 when they were about 12 weeks old. They get along pretty well for sisters though we do have to feed Terrance on top of an 8ft high bookshelf so that Sally doesn’t eat all of her food.

Are you looking for a (or another) little furry beast to love? Please check out Happy Tails, our weekly segment featuring the BC SPCA and one of the animals they currently have available for adoption. (You may have noticed that many of the Van City Kitties came from the SPCA!) Check back every Saturday for a new Happy Tails segment!

And if you adopted your pet from the SPCA and would like to share your awesome story on Happy Tails, send an email to vancitykitty@vancouverisawesome.com or Rory.Blanchard@novusnow.ca.

A few weeks back we started a feature called Crowdsourced Sunday where we reached out to all of the people following our @VIAwesome twitter account and asked them to tweet a photo of something cool they came across that weekend and shot on their smartphone or digital camera. We received hundreds of photos and it soon became one of my personal favourite features, and yours! People loved it, but the problem for me is that it was taking me hours to edit it, on a Sunday, and I personally didn’t have the time to manage it.

So who did I reach out to for help? Our twitter followers, of course! A bunch answered the call and we settled on longtime follower Jackie Picard (AKA @j_anxious) as our new Crowdsourced Sunday editor. She’ll be taking all of the images that you send us via Twitter and editing them into a weekly batch of pure, crowdsourced goodness.

She’ll be doing that starting next weekend, so watch our main @VIAwesome account for the prompts to tweet us your images. In the meantime, here’s a photo that I shot on my smartphone this weekend. It’s of some Canada Goslings (is that a word?) on Granville Island. So fluffy and cute!

With hockey fever at an all time high this year in Vancouver, Hockey Night in Canada’s annual ball hockey tournament  will be better than ever.  It will be held again this year at Metrotown on June 11th and 12th, registration must be in by June  8th, for more info check their website.  There are categories for everyone, and with street hockey being a game that at some point in your life, everyone has played, it’s Canada’s largest sports festival.  If you’re thinking of entering, just do it, it’s so much fun.

VIA’s team will be avenging our quarter final shoot out loss of last year in the coed division.  We’re back this year, and even hungrier.  Look forward for more posts profiling our players and coverage of the tournament.

This is our team from last year, before we lost….

Every day we share a single photo from our Flickr Pool shot by one of our faithful and talented readers (that’s you!).

Pretty geeked about what I found in the pool last night. Sure, it’s from February, but you’d never know just by looking at the photograph. Looks like a stellar day in February to be sure – everything is so green. And speaking of green, I am myself, with envy.

You see, the photograph below is from Larissa Sayer, who at the time was flying to (or from) Salt Spring Island. I’ve never flown over the city like that, or in a small plane for that matter; and I really enjoyed my time camping on Salt Spring a few summers ago. Now I really want to book a flight myself, so I can experience the same thing as Larissa – a fantastic perspective of Vancouver while Soaring Over Stanley Park.

“Looks like there are no delays on the Lions Gate Bridge currently, traffic appears to be flowing in both directions. That’s the traffic report, back to you.”

Gary