What happened to WTVS-Detroit?

Something terrible happened to channel 43 this summer.
Sometime, when I wasn’t paying attention, my tied-for-favourite PBS channel, WTVS-Detroit, vanished from my Shaw Cable lineup. And in its place was some cruddy kiddy TV station showing idiotic baby-oriented cartoons with primary colours, shrieking voices, and loud, clunky soundtracks.
It took me a few weeks to realize what [...]

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R.I.P. John Hughes, sincerely, The Breakfast Club

I blinked – hard – when I read the subject line in my email: John Hughes is dead.
“Stay tuned for multiple repeats of The Breakfast Club,” my main squeeze wrote. When someone you love dies, someone who loves you should be the one to break the news.
And I loved John Hughes.

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Stuff to do: Sea-to-Sky/Whistler

More from my list of fun stuff to do in the Vancouver area. This installment looks at the Sea-to-Sky highway and the resort town of Whistler.

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Movie magic to light up White Rock this summer

Set your DeLorean to Nov. 5, 1955, and power up your flux capacitor with 1.21 gigawatts because White Rock is heading Back to the Future!
The 1985 comic blockbuster, starring Burnaby’s own Michael J. Fox as time traveling, electric guitar-wielding skateboard enthusiast Marty McFly, is one of four family-friendly films lighting up a giant movie screen [...]

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‘People go crazy’ for local strawberries

Luscious local strawberries are here.
B.C.’s annual home-grown strawberry harvest is the best, brightest sign that summer in the Lower Mainland has finally arrived.
Deep, ruby red and bursting with an intense flavour, B.C.’s melt-in-your-mouth strawberry varieties are allowed to ripen on the vine so they ripen from the inside out – unlike the pulpy, tasteless Californian [...]

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Buddy, can you spare a luge run?

Keep in mind just over 3,000 athletes are coming to the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver next February. By strange coincidence, that’s the same number as Vancouver’s current homeless population.
If you ask me, 3,000 doesn’t sound like a lot when you’re talking about athletes for a “world class event” costing the host country billions in [...]

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City of Glass, South Fraser edition

Touring lottery prize homes is a year-round hobby when you live in White Rock.
The latest is the 2009 Hometown Heroes Lottery, which raises money for the UBC & VGH Hospital Foundation and the B.C. Professional Firefighters’ Burn Fund.
This year’s grand prize is a three-condo collection worth $1.9 million or a huge luxury home (haven’t seen [...]

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Canadians are “idiots”, Ignatieff skit reveals

Thank you, Gavin Crawford of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, for your impression of prime minister-in-waiting Michael Ignatieff, unveiled to a grateful TV audience last night.

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The PM’s handcuff fetish (Things I hated in 2008)

Does Stephen Harper even have a sense of humour? Consider this awkward moment from September 2008, when comedienne Geri Hall of CBC’s long-running fake news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes caught the PM and his staff off-guard at a press conference in Halifax.
Hall, standing in a sizable crowd of reporters, tried to ask Harper [...]

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Things I hated in 2008 – Celebrities

Thanks to the ubiquity of gossip websites on the internet, infotainment TV shows and the glut of glossy pop culture magazines at the grocery check out, no place is safe from celebrity news.
Certain faces appear again and again, bouncing into the news because of a newly-discovered baby bump, a stint in rehab, or an imminent [...]

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Sarah Palin (Things I hated in 2008)

John McCain’s Hail Mary Pass running mate announcement – coming practically on top of the triumphant Democratic party convention’s endorsement of Barack Obama and his VP choice Joe Biden – was one of the swiftest and most divisive political buzz kills of the summer.
I’m not sure what was more disturbing about Republican vice president hopeful [...]

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Trailer Park Boys got cancelled?!?

Yep, it’s all over for dope-smoking recidivists Ricky, Julian, Bubbles and the rest of the gang at the embattled Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Nova Scotia.
Director/creator Mike Clattenburg has supposedly promised another feature-length movie, but the TV series is finished. The last episode, Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys, an hour-long special involving a country and [...]

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Things I hated in 2008 – The Georgia Straight

When they’re not slagging Surrey, a time-honoured Vancouver tradition that’s definitely outlived its usefulness (surely by now everyone knows Langley is the new Surrey, and South Surrey is the new West Van; although parts of North Van are STILL the Surrey of the North Shore) the misanthropic scribes at the Straight are talking s— about [...]

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Another damn weather picture

Hey, what’s that blinding glowing ball in the sky?

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What a Grind

It’s every Vancouver fit freak’s rite of passage. People love it because they earn bragging rights. Not because it’s a great hike.
Which is a shame, because tourists in heels or flip-flops and not-so-fit newbies in jeans and hoodies are under the unshakable impression that the Grouse Grind is The Thing to Do around here.
Lured by [...]

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Federal election 2008: assessing the hangover

I don’t know about you, but last week’s federal election left me feeling kind of bummed out.
It’s not just the national results that are getting me down. It’s the local race, too.
My Conservative MP, the remarkably life-like Russ Hiebert, got re-elected. And I don’t believe he deserves it. Full disclosure: not a fan of the [...]

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An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom

TV has gone from bad to worse, and there’s truly no end in sight.
All that’s on are reality shows. And they’re all AN HOUR LONG! Sheesh. I don’t have the attention span for that.
The only bright spot in an otherwise desolate wasteland is Arrested Development re-runs on Channel 3. Tragically, the show was canceled ages [...]

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Pretty in Pink: Class-y conscience

Andie Walsh as a working class heroine? Absolutely.
A movie column I ran across online awhile back, Pretty in Penury, takes a long, loving look at Molly Ringwald’s character Andie in Pretty in Pink, the John Hughes movie where the girl from the Wrong Side of The Tracks falls for the guy with the silver spoon [...]

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