I realize that there hasn't been much by way of fresh material on this site for the last little while.  Luckily only 3 people ever read this site anyway and I'm one of them.

Why is this?  Why is this site never updated?  Am I lazy, am I running out of ideas, am I dying inside?  Yes.  Those things are all true, but they have been true forever so that takes them out of the running for explanations.

So here's something funny.  Two weeks ago my friends in the rock band Hills Have Eyes were playing some shows out on the west coast in Whistler, Victoria and Vancouver.  They suggested I come along as a groupie and it sounded like a great idea to make a vacation of it so I did.

So I caught a ride out to Victoria with some other friends to catch the Victoria and Vancouver shows which were on consecutive days.  I rode out with Brighton, a guy who once wrote stuff for this site, and his cool japanese girlfriend.  He brought her home with him from Japan making Japan somewhat the worse for this bargain but they got to rid themselves of Brighton in the deal, a halfway decent trade.

There's a town on Vancouver island with a general store that has a family of goats who live on the roof.  The roof is covered in grass which the goats eat.  To my surprise this amazing tourist attraction which I insisted we check out drew about a thousand people while we were there.  I wonder what happens to their poo?

These are the goats that live on the roof.  I took 4 pictures of them.  It was a bit of a waste of film.

Victoria was a bit of a surprise, I hadn't been there since I was a kid and I was shocked by the fact that everyone in that city has total shit for brains.  Almost not a single person in that city lives on planet Earth.  It is a city run on equal parts idealism and unemployment insurance.  It seems like everyone is a hippie and not a single brain cell in that city seems to be committed to function for any purposes other than freeloading and buddhism (the spiritual equivalent of freeloading).

Me, Brighton and his girlfriend, the pair of which I will from now on refer to as the truce of the white devil and the tiger lotus, all rented scooters and drove around Victoria.  This is the best way to see Victoria for a few simple reasons.  1.  Its a nice looking city that looks even better whizzing past you at 50 km and hour.  B.  You don't need to interact with the locals.

This is a picture of the 3 of us on the scooters taken by some moms that were hanging around the shoreline.  1 minute earlier I drove my scooter down that dirt hill behind us and almost got stuck.	This is an action shot of us taken by me.  In the background are about 200,000 hippies.

You may see a certain feeling towards the people of Victoria emerging here.  I don't dislike the people of Victoria, but there are a lot of hippies there and I have a difference of opinion with hippies.  Its not that I think I am better than hippies.  I just feel that many people make better choices than hippies, in fact I feel a chicken who had a stroke may make better choices than a hippy.

What is so bad about hippies?  Nothing really, I guess I just don't like the idea of someone suggesting that "a positive vibe" is of itself somehow a contribution to society.  That and they discredit a lot of my liberal values by taking them to extremes and thereby making them the subject of ridicule. 

These sketchy looking bastards are Hills Have Eyes.  This is them on the BC Ferry, unquestionably a reasonably priced and not total scam of a way to travel.

The next day I rode with the band to Vancouver where the next show was and we killed time downtown.  That band happens to be 4 funny guys and riding in the van with them was super comedy.  Here's an excerpt.

We're bored and sitting in the van which is parked on a street in downtown.  As it happens one of the shops in front of us is a porno store.  Some guy and girl are walking down the street and the Hills do a pretend conversation between the two of them while we spy on them from the shroud of camoflage of a giant white van on a tiny street.

"Hey baby lets just check in here for a second"

"No way you pervert ... well maybe I can get some anal beads."

So after the Hills Have Eyes played their set I was standing outside The Picadilly Pub with a group of friends trying to decide in which particular direction to get the hell away from The Picadilly Pub as soon as possible.  This was just to escape hearing any more of the following band which rivals The Songbirds of Canada for most mind blowingly unwatchable band of the year.

While we stood outside a woman came up behind me and asked me for spare change, I turned and looked at her and she scared the shit out of me.  She did not look well.  She looked like a stray cat who was about to scratch her way out of life number 9.  One of her pupils looked cloudy and although she was probably in her 30's I had this feeling she was pretty much finished.

In reality she didn't look that much more doomed than most of the other bums in downtown Vancouver, which doesn't say too much.  Call this a hunch but it looks to me like some of the residents of downtown Vancouver might have drug problems. 

I gave this woman my change, which was all I could think of.  Since then I have been thinking off and on about if there was anything better that I could have done or can do.

What can we do?  I have no idea.  I suppose the fact that generations of people who think and care more about it than me haven't found an answer might suggest its not an easy problem.  Easy or not it is definitely a problem.  I don't want that woman to die.  However this is all the subject of different and far more serious shit than my vacation.

There was a copy of People magazine which I chose to read thanks to the fact that it sitting on the coffee table of one of my friends who I imposed upon for a place to stay.  Unpredictably there were a few articles about J-Lo and Ben Affleck, something about Britney, the Hilton boozebags, a mention of the Cruise and Cruz.  Conspiciously absent was any mention of any People who were old, ugly or active in such low profile areas as science, politics, education, the economy, the government, or the environment.  More humorously absent is any mention of the runners up of the entertainment industry who made it halfway to fame.  Somewhere out there Howie Mandell picks up a copy of People magazine and probably realizes he's more likely to see his face chiseled out of a canyon on Mars than in that magazine.

I rented a scooter in Vancouver too.  I rode around downtown Vancouver in rush hour on the thing and I almost got killed a few times but it was pretty awesome.  I took it out through Kitsilano to a beach called Spanish Banks which I stayed at for 3 minutes just to watch the ships in the harbor.  Then I rode back and went as fast as I could down this super long hill. 

Going down the hill I buried the needle on the scooters speed-o-meter which only goes up to 60kmh.  I bet I was doing at least 75.  It was fuckin wicked.  Then I rode it around the wharf.

Driving home was also super fun.  Brighton's girl had the Sean Paul cd so we listened to it and sexy ladies they nah war with us.  I forced us to listen to The Strokes about 10 times and after about the 6th time I think everyone in the car agreed it was the best thing to do.

This is a picture I took of a bridge in the Shuswaps.  That is a part of the BC interior where a lot of white trash go camping.

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