1. It was a beautiful day, with crocuses blooming and people shedding too-warm jackets everywhere as they buzzed through the city.
2. It’s nice to see the city hasn’t cleaned up the Downtown Eastside. It’s there in all its usual glory: drug dealers around the Carnegie, people smoking crack in the alleys, more people selling stolen stuff on the sidewalk next to United We Can and, newly arrived, the tent city set up in the vacant lot across from Save-On Meats.
3. The number of twitter posts saying that Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson is “hot” has died off in recent days — a sign that all those young ladies writing about him must really be paying attention to the sports events.
4. It’s so great taking transit these days because there are buses and SkyTrains EVERYWHERE. I’ve been told that SkyTrain is running at 108 seconds in between trains. The Fraser bus, that I used to wait for downtown for sometimes as long as half an hour, seems to be running as often as the 99-B. If only it could stay like this — please someone give us $17 million extra every two months, like VANOC did for these two months.
5. Apparently many German media outlets, convinced that Councillor Andrea Reimer is One of Them, have been bombarding city hall with lengthy messages, all in German, addressed to “Frau Reimer.” We’ll never find out what they want. She doesn’t speak German.
6. There must be something wrong with me, because I completely don’t get why anyone would line up at a Coca-Cola or Acer or Samsung pavilion as I saw people doing yesterday at LiveCity Yaletown. Isn’t seeing hundreds of their ads plastered everywhere in the city enough?
7. Sadly, the few pavilions and country houses I have visited so far are equally puzzling. The Italians are usually masters of design and display, but Casa Italia at the Roundhouse is a sad shrivelled little collection of a few Italian things. And Vancouver House — can you tell me why anyone from the general public would want to visit a place that is essentially a very large business brochure explaining how great it would be to invest in this city?
8. The West House, the sustainably designed laneway-size house sitting next to Vancouver House, is, however, kind of cool. Makes you realize what you can do with that kind of space when it is well designed. Too bad they didn’t put it in the middle of Granville Mall where someone could see it.
9. Why did the men’s short program have such good music (Jimi Hendrix, in one case!) while the pairs’ skating the previous two nights was a Top 100 Cheesy and Overdone Songs. Geez, the only thing I didn’t hear was “Fever.”
10. Sorry I didn’t write more today, but I was busy with several other pieces, including one on our new label of “Worst Olympics Ever,” which I’ll post when it gets published.