My hatches are battened. My car is frozen to the ground anyway; I don’t think it needs battening.
Apparently today it’s going to snow a little bit for every time over the last 5 years that I have said, “It might snow tonight.” That’s a lot of snow, people. Oooooeeeeee!
I know I shouldn’t go near canada.com except to log in to my old email account. I realize I incur a great moral debt when I grace its stories with my time & energy. But I see the headlines and before I can stop myself, I have to go to the stories. I know they will make me angry, but I do it anyway.
Double-threat to my usual happy-go-lucky-flitty-fairy mood this morning: an article about the fatal shooting in Gastown on the weekend, plus the interview with a man on CBC radio’s Early Edition who claims the shooting “never would have happened if the bars weren’t open till 4 am.” OK Mr.Semantic-pants. It would have happened 2 hours earlier, then. Happy?
The article says: Fatal Gastown Fight over Girl. Next to the headline is a photo of Rachel Davis. Rachel Davis is not the girl referred to in the headline. She is the girl who was walking down the street, saw a guy getting the shit kicked out of him and stepped in to help. She was shot for her trouble.
It is disrespectful to use the picture and the persona of Rachel Davis to try to bolster bad journalism. We recognize her face by now and it breaks our hearts because her picture does portray her as her parents and friends have described her: sunny, happy, creative, bursting with potential. Her face does not belong next to an already inflammatory headline. Can’t get a picture of the chick who started it all? Put up somebody else’s picture. As long as people read the article, right?
No. None of this is Rachel Davis’ fault. Nor is it the fault of the chick with the great ass who wouldn’t go home with gun-guy one and chose gun-guy two. It is not the fault of the Purple Onion, of Gastown, of Vancouver, of drug dealers, of police officers, of 4 am bar closures, or the snow. It is the fault of the dickhead with the gun and it is the fault of that part of his brain that says, “I am going to carry around something that kills people because I am just that fucking great. I need to preserve my own greatness as much as possible by killing anyone who says I’m not great or gets in the way of how great I am.” It is his fault.
In 1996 the all-time Vancouver record for snowfall in one day – 41 cm – was recorded. This is what it looked like when our kitten Elvis (for Costello, thank you) was placed on the snow (those green things are garbage cans):
Damn those were cute kittens (and one stinky basement suite):
It was nicer outside:
