Michael R. Barrick

I just got off the phone with Metro Vancouver's managing editor Fernando Carneiro about this whole Pedobear thing. A few things about this:

1. I remain stunned and amused that due to a careless bit of journalism in a small town newspaper half a planet away, something I did seven months ago as an off-handed visual critique of the 2010 mascots has garnered this much attention, and
2. now that it has garnered all this attention, that the Metro is the first and only paper to have contacted me directly by any means at all.

Not that I actually like talking to the press, since, as this whole thing points out with abundant clarity, journalistic integrity and factual accuracy left the building some time around when the Sun Tower was the tallest building in the British Empire (that'd be an exaggeration to those of you out there that don't get sarcasm and hyperbole.)

It's actually been preferable to have the papers that have so far picked up on this just cutting and pasting from my blog. Cut-and-paste makes it a lot less likely for me to be misquoted as I have been in previous encounters with the media, and as I hope I won't be in tomorrow's Metro.

But let's be clear here, nonetheless. The intent of the image in question was as a visual critique. The minute I saw the mascots I noticed the unfortunate resemblance, and I'm not the only one (damn, though, it was hard weeding those out from all the posts related to Gazeta Olsztyńska's mistake!)

The irony is that I was basically pointing out how easy a mistake like this would be. Sometimes when you're right, you're right.

The other interesting thing about this has been watching how this has progressed:

Thursday: The Gazeta Olsztynska makes the mistake; some Internet-savvy Olsztyn locals see the mistake, LOL, and post some satirical demotivational posters.
Friday: I start getting comments, mostly from people in Poland, and I LOL.
Saturday: Other people are LOL-ing right along, and I remain amused, especially by those that are oblivious (that Spanish sports blog as since corrected their mistake, but the evidence remains in the comments - I should have got a screenshot.)
Saturday Evening: Now it is viral. A story about the mistake, with a link here, makes it to #2 on Digg. BoingBoing blogs it.
Sunday: Now things are starting to get stupid. And by things, I mean comments in my blog (which I screen.) But hey, maybe someone is dumb enough to send me money. Didn't work.
Monday: People go back to work and start seeing what happened over the weekend, and the Telegraph UK picks up the story; there is whole new audience.

Now, I'm kind of dreading tomorrow. When the Metro comes out it will end up in the hands of a whole raft of mouth-breathers that won't get it at all and some of them will end up here. You know the type: people who pick up the dailies like the Metro and just leave them on the Skytrain with their not-quite-empty Starbucks cup; people who have AOL accounts; people who don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" (but don't really need to because they write "UR" anyway); people who talk on their cell phone on the bus; people who have a cell phone and an iPod because they don't know they can get a phone that plays MP3s; and people who still think the Olympics are a good thing.

Yesterday morning (December 10, 2007) Port Moody council shut down lanes of traffic through Port Moody during the morning rush-hour in order to intentionally snarl traffic. The misguided media stunt fails on every imaginable front.

The timing of the stunt itself is laughable. The deadline for registering to speak at of the pertinent Translink meeting was, as was stated on the Port Moody website that inconvenienced commuters were directed to visit, was 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. The media stunt began at 6:45 a.m. Presuming commuters passing through Port Moody at the time were on their way to jobs with start times between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., too late register, one has to wonder what point the stunt actually served.

This becomes even more questionable considering the content of the media release from Port Moody where Mayor Trasolini is quoted as saying [emphasis added]:

"If the four-lane overpass is not approved this week by the TransLink Board Port Moody will have no other recourse than to negotiate removing Murray and Clarke Streets from the major road network, take back the roads as a local responsibility and change the traffic patterns to accommodate Port Moody drivers rather than regional commuters."

I fail to see the problem with that. In what way does that outcome fail to comply with Port Moody's vision statement, "Port Moody, City of the Arts, is a unique, safe, vibrant waterfront city of strong neighbourhoods; a complete community that is sustainable and values its natural environment and heritage character"? In what way does that outcome fail to meet Port Moody's 2006-2008  Council Strategic Plan which states as goals:

"Our plans lead to livable neighbourhoods that come together to create a complete community. Port Moody distinguishes itself as an innovative and visionary leader in planning,"

and,

"Port Moody plans ahead for livability and we are seen as sustainability leaders,"

and most notably,

To sustain livability, we plan ahead and adapt to changing circumstances.

We integrate the concepts of livability and sustainability in all that we do to create a lasting, vibrant economy with a healthy environment, social wellbeing and long term affordability and prosperity.

We foster service that results in a healthy community and we have confirmed this statistically.

In Port Moody, people are able to travel effectively around the community which includes creating pedestrian-oriented shopping & service areas.

St. Johns Street is already a urban desert of 60's-era car culture - six uncrossable lanes lined with car lots and service garages. How will adding adding a second high-volume path through town add to the "heritage character" of Moody Centre? ...but Port Moody city hall likes car culture. This is evidenced by the one of those very car-lots receiving honourable mention in the "Street Appeal" category of the city's own "Spike Award."

It's apparent that Port Moody's real agenda is not to tend to it's own sustainability and environment, but to bend over and be Coquitlam's bitch, catering to the surrounding municipality's hordes of gas-sucking, SUV driving commuters on their way to Burnaby and Vancouver. If Port Moody city hall really cared about their own community they'd be following the lead set by Vancouver decades ago when the city had the good sense to learn from Los Angeles' mistakes and rejected freeways and focused on transit. This effort would be better placed in fighting tooth and nail to reduce through traffic and pollution by getting the Evergreen LRT Line completed.

In the end, the only purpose of this stunt would be to get Mayor Trasolini on the TV as "the good guy", which ultimately is nothing more than a career advancing move for Port Moody City Manager Gaëtan Royer.

I've been reading "Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley" by Derek Hayes and have had a few old mysteries about certain streets cleared up. Ever wonder why the block between Alberni and Georgia streets is so narrow and why Alberni abruptly ends at Burrard? Or why, excluding Georgia, Davie, Pacific and Nelson, none of the streets west of Burrard match up with the streets east of Burrard? And why does Burrard, the busiest north-south street through downtown, just end at 16th? Or why there is a bizarre dog-leg in Oak Street at 16th? Or why on Granville there are shops north of 16th abruptly giving way to giant lots with mansions on the south side of 16th? What's up with that great big square of nothing in Richmond between Alderbridge, Westminster Highway. Garden City and Shell Road?

Well the mismatching of streets downtown on either side of Burrard is because, prior to incorporating together in 1886, there were two separate town sites on the downtown peninsula. East of Burrard was "Granville" and west of Burrard to Stanley Park was "Liverpool". Granville was laid out with the long side of the block parallel to Burrard, whereas Liverpool had the short side parallel to Burrard. Pacific, Davie, Nelson and Robson more or less line up by accident. Granville was a CPR townsite and Georgia was already established as main street so the planners of Liverpool carried it through despite that it interrupts their grid, thus the narrowness of the block between Alberni and Georgia, the after-the-fact dog-legs at Smithe-Haro and Dunsmuir-Melville, the weird left-over street-to-nowhere that is Eveliegh, and all the other "what were they thinking?" weirdness that happens at Burrard.

And why does Burrard itself just suddenly end at 16th? Because, in 1886, that's where Vancouver ended. The original city limit was at 16th and all the space beyond was unincorporated nothing. When the Interurban electric railway was built between New Westminster and Vancouver the people that had land in the intervening unincorporated space got together to incorporate everything from Point Grey to North Road as a new municipality. There was a disagreement over the name. The farmers in the eastern part wanted it named "Burnaby" after Colonel Moody's secretary Robert Burnaby, who was the first to survey and map Burnaby Lake. Real estate speculators who wanted to make money selling lots near the Interurban line wanted to call the new municipality "South Vancouver" since they thought that was a more marketable name. They split the territory at what became Boundary Road. To the east was Burnaby, to the west was South Vancouver. South Vancouver incorporated in 1891. Burnaby in 1892. Like the Liverpool/Granville join, the grid for South Vancouver was laid out separately from the grid in Vancouver, thus the mis-match of Oak at 16th.

Because land was cheaper in South Vancouver than in Vancouver lots in the east were marketed to blue-collar sorts. The municipal government of South Vancouver refused to go into debt and roads and other services weren't getting built fast enough to suit the richer land-owners in the western part, so they split off (at Cambie Street, then called Bridge Street) in 1908 and formed the municipality of Point Grey. The abrupt change in zones on Granville at 16th is because at the time houses like Hycroft Mansion were being built, they weren't in Vancouver. Point Grey and South Vancouver were separate municipalities up until 1929, and it is no accident that the new (and current) Vancouver city hall, built shortly after amalgamation, is at 12th and Cambie, more or less where the three municipalities met.

So what's the connection to all this and that weird patch of nothing in the middle of Richmond? It goes back to the Interurban - and this is funny in a painfully stupid kind of way. The original line of the Interurban, built in 1891, connected New Westminster and Vancouver, spurring the creation of Burnaby and South Vancouver. In 1902 a second line was opened to Steveston. That's what the railway tracks beside Arbutus Street in Vancouver and along Shell Road in Richmond are. In the 1920's someone had the brilliant idea of putting an airport along the Interurban line in Richmond and that blot of nothing is it. When planes got bigger and longer runways were needed the airport was moved to Sea Island, but think about it for a second. In 1986, in order not to look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking millions were spent to build the original line of SkyTrain between Vancouver and New Westminster. Guess what path it follows? The path of the electric railway that was there in 1891. And right now, again simply to not look like dufuses with the rest of the planet looking because of the 2010 Winter Olympics, hundreds of millions more are being spent to build rail transit to Richmond that we had in 1902 and a connection to the airport that we effectively had before there was an airport. It seems that in the area of transit all we've managed to accomplish in the last twenty-one years is flail around trying to rebuild what was in place over a century ago.

As the Skytrain rolled past the 1960's concrete towers near Lougheed Mall I started thinking about how these buildings were the inspiration for the apartments-on-stalks in the Jetsons. It's a matter of extrapolation: the car park takes up the first few floors and the upper floors are the more desirable apartments. Why bother building the lower floors at all if no-one wants to live in them? And with the flying cars in the context of 1960's car-culture you no longer have the need for the ground-level parking and entrance - obviously people would simply fly in and out of the upper floors directly and never need to walk anywhere.

So then I started thinking about what life would be like in the Jetsons future for people who weren't Vice Presidents at Spacely Sprokets or their whiny, privileged, bleach-blond daughters? What of all the poor sods put out of work by Rosie the robot maid and her ilk? What miserable life would they be living down on the surface, forgotten below these unassailable towers of bourgeois privilege? Would miserable shanty villages be huddled up against the bases of the towers to tap into what little heat and power could be gleaned off the service shaft? Would their inhabitants survive off the cast-offs from the ten thousand slovenly, video-game addicted, overweight Elroy's above? Between the tower bases would there be the hollowed out, abandoned shells of closed businesses that once thrived on pedestrian traffic? What horrors lurk beneath the world of George and Jane Jetson?