Appeared in the North Shore News – August 28, 2015 We in West Vancouver put the world’s crises in calm perspective. Global markets falling. Faith in the prime minister shaken, or stirred, depending on your martini recipe. Is Greece collapsing — still, since the Peloponnesian War? Is UBC’s ivory tower only plastic? Is Justin Trudeau…
Category: North Shore News
Santa Monica future awaits in West Vancouver
Appeared in the North Shore News – August 14, 2015 I have a daymare. Here it is. In this daymare, I see a bagman for West Vancouver’s CAAD, the Centre for Art, Architecture + Design. The bagman is on the street begging — CAADging, you might say — for small change for this proposed three-storey-and-underground-parking…
Ambitious vision touted for gallery-plus
Appeared in the North Shore News – July 31, 2015 Wrong. Public demand, small. Public money, big. Public need, registering at all? And at the top of the list, mine, anyway: wrong, wrong, wrong site. That’s the long-sought West Vancouver art gallery — now art-gallery-plus, the appeal and the pitch broadened in recent years under…
Mankind sure is a sentimental beast
Appeared in the North Shore News – July 17, 2015 What moves you, heart and soul? Is it, among recent top news stories, Greece? Drought? Fiery forests? Senate sleaze? The long-running drama Health Researcher Follies? Bus Stop, starring TransLink? Stock market tremors? Cracked China? Interest rates? Pan Am Games, Canadians modestly accepting that they’re No….
Soccer donation in bureaucratic limbo
Appeared in the North Shore News – July 3, 2015 Speaking personally as a notorious skinflint, just how a West Vancouver barber charging 15 bucks for an old-guy’s haircut can do it is beyond my comprehension. “It” being good-deeds citizen Michel Ibrahim’s shouldering of a baffling burden in Beirut — nicked $3,500 in customs and…
Regendered Jenner faces feminist critiques
Appeared in the North Shore News – June 19, 2015 Hold on — is it possible that those demanding social tolerance are themselves harshly intolerant? The news elites have chosen as our times’ biggest story the transformation of former male Bruce Jenner to female Caitlyn Jenner, with the triumphant media epiphany of a cover photo…
Premier’s dark side slowly emerging
Appeared in the North Shore News – June 5, 2015 Christy Clark is becoming nasty, vengeful and self-pardoning in her old age. Such a nice lady, too. On camera, anyway. Beaming smile. Can’t imagine her using the f-adjective describing the federal cabinet, as Green Party leader Elizabeth May — another big smiler, gleaming like a…
B-line to Armageddon if No prevails?
Appeared in the North Shore News – May 22, 2015 The $7.5-billion transit plebiscite coffin should have so many nails in it that it may require a second coffin. There’s a note of desperation in the Yessirs’ plea-cum-threat to Metro Vancouverites to lend approval to the 10-year plan, funded by a half-percentage-point lift in the…
Just take the No. 250 Utopia bus
Appeared in the North Shore News – May 8, 2015 This may be a unique reason to vote against the big interests’ Metro transit plan: It doesn’t go far enough. Universal rule: All transit systems stimulate the authorities’ Stalinism. The business, bureaucratic, political, academic and union elites — the now and future car-driving class —…
Talk of a third crossing grows old
Appeared in the North Shore News – April 24, 2015 Well, that should be the nail in the coffin. Maybe a whole carpenter’s apronful of nails. I speak of the prospects for a North Shore Yes vote in the transit plebiscite, somewhat pushed out of the public mind by fresher disasters. Still personally debating whether…