Drones Over The Teardown

I wouldn’t know anything about that. I know a lot of guys who’d take a couple of hits and fold, but I didn’t think it would happen to me. That’s why I’m denying everything.

I did nothing.  I didn’t dig that hole and I didn’t fill it in, and I sure as heck didn’t kill anybody.  It’s a rite of passage.  Burying something in the back yard.

IMG_0488Then the drones came.  Actually, it was just one drone, and I wasn’t there.  But it’s easy to imagine.  You’ve spent years building this place up.  You wish you could wake up from this nightmare.

There’s a drone hovering about twenty feet over your head and it’s right over your mother’s backyard.  That’s the backyard that’s had the heck beat out of it the last couple of weeks with this ‘gotta get rid of this old buried fuel oil tank’ thing.  It took a terrible toll on the “Lily of The Valley” I can tell you that.

They buried hundreds of these things in old Point Grey backyards in the old days, home heating oil tanks, before the 50s when natural gas heating came in.  And most people just plugged the tanks and left them there.  City Hall wants ’em out now.  Especially if you’re selling.

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Interesting news out of Hollywood tonight. I was glad to see Chris Hemsworth has signed for another 8 episodes as “The Kid With the Mask”.  Love that show. Drives around in a car with this stupid, small, black mask covering the middle of his face and helps people.

Executive producer Jay Fritz told Entertainment Weekly “We’re thrilled and very grateful ABC has picked up the show for another season. And we’re looking forward to the continuation of a very strong relationship.” I hope so. It’s the greatest thing ABC’s done Wednesday night since “That’ll Be the Day”.  Co-star, the mercurial Jack Black, who plays Hemsworth’s sidekick “Diablo” is coming back too. Cool.IMG_0720

Eighteen tons of contaminated soil they hauled out of there.  Love that song my grandaddy used to hum.  ‘You load eighteen tons and whadya get?’  I think it was ‘sixteen tons and whadya get?’, actually.  They filled the hole with sand and topsoil and threw in a sidewalk they’d destroyed in their ravings, for bulk.

The house is mostly empty now and is going on the market.  Its a brave little house and we know it’ll do well and, who knows, maybe it won’t be a teardown.

Maybe someone will recognize the house for what it is—a bunch of 72 year old wood and plaster and stucco and concrete that comes with a dilapidated garage out back for a couple of million bucks.  And they’ll want to keep it just the way it is because they’re old fashioned.

My consort was so incensed at the sight of this drone she went to investigate.  And when my consort gets incensed and goes to investigate my advice is get out of the way.IMG_0690A couple of houses up the back lane she could see a guy on a back deck intently focused on his drone control panel.  Two children were playing in the backyard below him.  They weren’t that interested in what he was doing.

My consort stood there for about a full minute waiting for the brother to notice her so she could say something like, “Sir, don’t fly your d*&%#* drone over private property”.  Or, “Sir, you need to be in control of your d*&%#* stupid, irritating, obnoxious, invasive, noisy drone.”  He did not have his drone in control.  And didn’t know where it was.  But he never looked up.

 

Slurgfest et al

samoyeddogs has been digging holes in the backyard again and has come up with some more dirt about this:

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I have to tell you that Rod Filbrandt was not involved.  The dirt was flying and the pristinely pink paw pads of the research team were getting blackened.

This now unfortunately disappeared piece of “urban art”, we’ll call it, for lack of a more precise definition, that was at the rear of a now demolished building that until last year stood at the southwest corner of 7th and Cambie, wherever that is, is a mashup, if you’ll pardon the expression, of at least three different artists who added their genius at different times.  At least that’s how I remember it.

I don’t know about the pinstripe teddy bears and the swerving, scribbling tag at the top of the image, but the two things to the left of the teddies are examples of a “Slurg”, creation of artist Joachim Lau.

Slurgs-Joachim Lau Herr Lau is originally from Hamburg, Germany but currently, as far as we can tell, resides in Toronto, Ontario.  Whether Joachim Law drew his work in situ or whether he had his work drawn for him by somebody who admires it is not known at the present time, as they say in law enforcement.

The stencil on the right of the top image is by “Jerm IX”  aka Jeremy Aaron Bertrand.  Maybe everybody knows this but me, but Jerm IX was active locally for some time.

Jerm IX stencilJerm IX works in stencil and according to our police scanner was arrested and charged with defacing public property, or whatever exactly the charge was, in Peterborough, Ontario December 2015.

Which is too bad and civic overkill, but that is for the judge to decide, if she or he hasn’t already.

Jerm IX did a lot of stencilling when he resided here in Vcr.  His work is also brilliant and I wish I had ten thousand of these guys.

Have a wonderful evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The White Dogs

Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars

It’s about that time again. Time to reiterate for all you stragglers who may not have gotten it an explanation for the existence of whatever exactly is going on here.  Spring is here and spring is a time of renewal.  That’s what the old man always said.

In a way that disclaimer ‘It’s Not About The Dogs’ isn’t true.  It is about the dogs, but the dogs in the poem, the samoyed dogs that were, or are, “climbing up” onto that ship in English Bay sometime about 1912.  The dogs in Blaise Cendrars’ poem “Vancouver”.  Right?  Were they real?

It doesn’t matter if the whole thing was fiction.  That the poet, Blaise Cendrars, the Frenchman, just imagined it.  Just imagined those “shape-shifting Samoyeds” as Mr. Colin Browne so eloquently put in in his introduction to a section in issue 3.23 / Spring 2014 of The Capilano Review devoted to Monsieur Cendrars, and whether or not he was ever actually in Vancouver.  Mr. Browne subsequently challenged me to a duel, but I just don’t have any time for that right now.

IMG_0385For back information on this controversy you may want to look into the archives August 2014.  Archives.  Imagine.

“We bump against the dark bulk of the ship and on the
Starboard quarter Samoyed dogs are climbing up
Flaxen in the gray-white-yellow
As if fog was being taken in freight”

There ain’t but one way to explain things and this here is it.  It’s 1912.  The dogs.  Climbing up.  Grimpent des chiens samoyèdes.  Cool.  Yes?  No?  As if fog was being taken in freight?  Fog?  As freight?  Anybody?  Dogs?  Woof?

IMG_0436So that was it.  The creative idea.  The confusing, perhaps a little, perhaps not, self-indulgent reason why this thing is called samoyeddogs and isn’t about the dogs.

Those creepy, cuddly, fluffy, white, dog hair-bearing quadrupeds that you can read about anywhere but here.  That’s them.  Altogether now:  “Samoyeddogs are climbing up, climbing up…”

 

Coming soon:  “The White Dog”.