Robbed!

I, for one, am outraged. Tonight on Project Runway, Austin Scarlett, whom I earlier nicknamed "Flip" -- a monicker which became obsolete after he wore fabulous finger waves which I must say I admired excessively -- did not win the Banana Republic Party Dress contest. This in spite of the fact that he made the prettiest dress BY FAR!

I would like to inform the judges that they have made a terrible, terrible mistake: yes, that includes you, Michael Kors. Austin and I put forward a dress that Banana Republic should have been proud to manufacture and sell. (Which reminds me that I watched The Corporation tonight and will no longer be buying mass-produced clothes due to the sweat shop factor. I will henceforth be relying on Austin to make all my clothes. I hope you're good with that, Austin.)

Almost as disturbing was the trailer for next week that showed Austin crying! CRYING! Austin and I did not go on Project Runway to be abused. We entered the competition to win and to show our prodigious design talents. So heads up judges. Consider this your first warning. You make Austin cry and you will find yourself on the wrong side of me. You will end up standing in the shadow of the Jubster and it's not a safe place to be. I'm just saying... in a threatening way.

Finally, I received further confirmation that Austin is my spiritual design twin because when the other contestants, who have morphed from baby birds into vultures, went out and got trashed after a hard day of designing, Austin went to bed after first putting on clean white socks. EXACTLY what I would have done. Well, maybe not when I was twenty. But it would certainly be my strategy now.

Stay strong, Austin. I'm with you every step of the way.

Write a Letter! Write Two!

I realise the blog's been a bit quiet lately. That's because I've been writing letters. Okay. That's a lie. I have been revising my novel. But I'm going to start writing letters.

My first letter will be to the people who own part of Mount Benson, the mountain that faces Nanaimo. The owners, Judith Pennyfeather and Peter Reeve, have refused to sell the property at its appraised value to a coalition who is attempting to save the forest. They have refused to negotiate, presumably because they want more money; money they can only get if the area is logged.

Here is a brief summary from the Nanaimo Area Land Trust newsletter on the situation:

Update About Mt. Benson Negotiations – And What You Can Do


In March the Coalition to Save Mount Benson made an offer to Judith Pennyfeather and Peter Reeve, owners of the 523-acre property at the top of the mountain, to purchase their land. A brief letter of reply from their lawyer indicated that negotiations had been called off because “the parties are too far apart”. In response, the Coalition sent an OPEN LETTER to the owners, with copies to local media and other parties, to summarize what has happened so far since our first communications in the summer of 2003.

Apart from an angry phone call from the Pennclan-Reeve lawyer, the open letter yielded no response. Since then, two subsequent letters have been sent directly to the owners, informing them of the Coalition’s recent efforts to gain additional funding support from the Province, and urging that they indicate some figure that they feel is a reasonable sale price for the property.

Thus far, there continues to be no response from Pennclan-Reeve. However, the Coalition will continue to meet with Mike Hunter, the RDN, and any other party that could help to bring the owners back to the table.


What To Do Next…

What you – and all of your friends and neighbours – can do is WRITE LETTERS! Letters to the candidates, to the media, to various government levels – even to the property owners. Letters, whether emails or the old-fashioned kind, are better than phone calls because they pile up and can be counted.

For more information on Mt. Benson and its importance click here: http://www.nalt.bc.ca

We have perhaps 4-6 weeks before logging will resume on the mountaintop. The following is a suggested list of people you can send it to:

NOTE: Whenever you send a letter consider sending copies to several people on this list, and remember to cc it to the local media.


Premier Gordon Campbell
Room 156, Parliament Buildings
Victoria, BC V8V 1X4
Fax: 250 387-0087

Michael DeJong
Minister of Forests
PO Box 9049, STN PROV GOV
Victoria, BC V8W 8E2
Fax: 250-387-1040

Mike Hunter, MLA
Liberal Candidate for Nanaimo
Constituency Office
106 - 335 Wesley Street, Nanaimo, BC V9R 2T5
Phone Nanaimo: 250-716-5266
email: mike.hunter.mla@leg.bc.ca

Ron Cantelon,
Liberal Candidate for Nanaimo/Parksville
1615 Northfield Road, Nanaimo, V9S 3A8
Phone: 250-756-4800 email: ron.cantelon@nanaimo.ca

Leonard E. Krog
NDP Candidate for Nanaimo
2120 Bay Street, Nanaimo, V9T -
Phone: 250-716-8755 (Constituency office)
Email: krogco@shaw.ca

Carol McNamee,
NDP Candidate for Nanaimo/Parksville
4988 Lost Lake Rd, Nanaimo, V9T 5E4
Phone: 250-751-1568
email: electcarol@telus.net

Doug Catley
Green Party Candidate for Nanaimo
PO Box 86 Station A, V9R 5K4
phone/fax: 250-753-4861
email: catley@island.net


Jean Crowder, Federal MP for Nanaimo
Constituency Phone: 1-866-609-9998
Suite 101-126 Ingram St. Duncan, V9L 1P1
email: crowdj1@parl.gc.ca

Joe Stanhope, RDN Chairman
Regional District of Nanaimo
6300 Hammond Bay Rd, Nanaimo V9T 6N2
email: corpsrv@rdn.bc.ca

Gary Korpan, Mayor: City of Nanaimo
455 Wallace Street, Nanaimo, BC V9R 5J6
Fax: 250-754-8263
email: garykorpan@shaw.ca



MEDIA

Nanaimo Daily News
Attention: Peter Godfrey - Letter to the Editor
B1, 2575 McCullough Road
Nanaimo BC V9S 5W5
Fax: 729-4288
email: dnews@island.net


The Nanaimo Bulletin
Attention: Roy Linder - Letter to the Editor
777B Poplar St., Nanaimo BC V9S 2H7
Fax 753-0788
email: edit@nanaimo.vinewsgroup.com

If you want to contact the owners, Judith Pennyfeather and Peter Reeve, you can call them at 1- 250-748-6218 or fax them at 1- 250-748-6219 and encourage them politely to negotiate. We want them to get a fair price for the land based on the survey. This situation can work out to everyone’s benefit, only if common sense prevails.


The second letter I'm going to write will be in support of saving East Creek, one of the last pieces of old growth forest on Vancouver Island. I totally encourage any of you who are interested in accumulated in good karma (and oxygen) to write a letter, send a cheque or just spread the word. The situation developing in East Creek is an honest-to-god tragedy.

To learn more about how you can save East Creek click here: http://www.saveeastcreek.com/

The Corn Husk Not Taken

It's tax season again and as a result I am watching far more than my usual allotment of television. This is because I have to spend hours and hours sorting through and filing receipts. My accounting system involves throwing every piece of paper I receive into a box. Then, somewhere around mid-April, I have to organize it all. Then I have to make calculations. These I always get wrong. Really wrong. For instance, last year it appeared for a while there that I had made just under three million dollars and had expenses in the two hundred dollar range. In the next version I had made approximately (my numbers are always approximate: I hate to be pinned down) five thousand and spent six. As a result of my creative approach to addition and subtraction, James always has to recheck everything. He loves that.

All this to say, in a not very smooth way, that I recently discovered the best reality show on television. Yes, I know that's not saying much. But I saw my first episode of Project Runway and it is brilliant. It's the show where a group of aspiring fashion designers compete to become, well, fashion designers. I'm sure they get contracts or the opportunity to act as some fashion dictator's lackey. Whatever. The important thing is that this is one reality show where the challenges are actually interesting and telling.

The show is hosted by Heidi Klum. She's got a certain popsicle stick woodenness about her that makes me suspect she has been sedated with something natural but very powerful, like a combination of tea tree oil and a ultra-potent batch of St. Johns Wort. The contestants themselves are amazing. They are absolutely bizarre and terrific and non-reality-TV-ish. This week's winner had a flip in his hair that could compete with Sandra Dee's. They are all as sensitive as baby birds. I want to hug all of them every time they open their mouths. "Sssh," I would say nurturingly, dropping in a worm of encouragement. "You are too strange for this world. Don't ever leave Parson's School of Design in New York. It is obviously the only place you will ever truly be understood. Can you understand me or is that flip of hair in your eye making hearing difficult?"

This week they were sent into a grocery store with fifty dollars and told to buy what they needed to make their outfits. This occasioned mass panic in all the young designers. They are the most fearful group of reality show contestants ever, probably because they are not aspiring actresses and models (THANK GOD): they are young artists.

It was much fun to watch them sprint around buying up lawnchairs and crawfish and hauling away at the rolls of plastic produce bags as though the end was coming and they, for one, didn't plan to be caught without enough bags. Good fun that. Still, I admit that I didn't for one minute think anyone would make anything decent-looking. After all, real designers never do. The runways are full of the most ridiculous stuff. So what would these poor fragile creatures, with their angular haircuts and twee little flat, pointy shoes be able to do with bags of green peppers and lifesavers?

Turns out they were able to work miracles. The candies were transformed into an ensemble that could have been worn with pride by the Little Mermaid, all that tin foil became a poufy skirt and the ironing board cover became an Edwardian collar (similar to what Hilary Swank wore to the Oscars some years ago). They all created amazing outfits out of their materials, even the young man who made a structured suit jacket out of butcher's paper and a draped dress out of garbage bags, taking breaks only to talk about the unity of his artistic vision and to do a bit of break-dancing/karate chopping for joy.

The winner was Flip. He made a quite beautiful dress out of corn husks. He suffered several crises of confidence along the way: both his flip and his lip quivered with emotion many times. When he arrived in the morning to find that the garment he'd woven had shrunk overnight, the quivering became urgent, his limpid eyes blinked rapidly, tears welled. There were whispered conferences, possibly some off-screen breakdowns. (Still, less drama and far fewer tears than on The Contenderor The Ultimate Fighter). In the end, Flip won. And the dress was fabulous as Michael Kors, the designer from Sex and the City who was so fond of making Sara Jessica Parker look like a designer's idea of a crack addict with a shoe fetish, and the Elle magazine editor were actually smart enough to realize. Hurrah for the first rational judges on reality TV!

Here's where I shoe-horn myself into the story. As soon as I saw the grocery store and heard about the task, I said: Corn! Use cornhusks! And Flip did and he won. What does this say? It says that perhaps my decision to leave The International Academy of Foofaraw and Design was premature. Perhaps I ought to have stuck it out. I admit that I lacked focus. Drive. The ability to sew, drape or draft. That the school asked me to leave when they discovered I'd spent all my tuition funds on a series of unfortunate outfits and even more unfortunate parties and was unable to pay my tuition. But still! What could have been? I now know that I had the right instincts. I might not have woven the husks together quite so artfully as Flip. I probably would have used beer cap buttons to drape my model in a shapeless bag made of corn leavings in the half hour I was actually able to concentrate before I had to head off to Lee's Palace to go dancing. But the instincts are definitely there. Sigh.

Well, now Flip is going to have to do it for me, too. For what might have been had I been a bit more sensitive, had a flip rather than a bob, worn flats rather than thigh-high black leather boots and managed to get to school before noon at least once. Go Flip Go!

Your colleague in Corn Husk Art Potential,

Susan

For those who care about

wild salmon. This would include flyfishers, like my Jimmy, bears, eagles and dogs who like to roll in dead salmon on the riverbanks (you know who you are) and millions of people.

www.thetyee.ca

Factoid: Did you know that farmed salmon are marketed as "fresh salmon"? People, for some reason, respond to "fresh" more than "wild". Fresh, in the case of farmed salmon, means fish full of antibiotics, dye and a variety of other nasties. I'm just saying...

Arrested Development

Dear Fox,

I heard through the TV-watcher's grapevine that Arrested Development might be cancelled. The following are my arguments in favour of leaving the show on the air:

1. The show is named after me. Or at least my level of emotional maturity.

2. It's really funny and clever and well-acted and all that. Seriously. It's great. Plus, somewhere along the line Justin Bateman has become, well, oddly hot. This is NOT something I would have predicted when I was 12.

3. In order to convince you to keep the show on the air, I hereby swear I will make the ultimate statement of support. I will buy one of the products advertised during the show. (Please don't start advertising only cars, because I don't have the funds to buy a car at the moment. I'm not really a car person. But don't worry, I'm still a desirable demographic. I spend money like a person who failed grade eight math. More than twice.

Note: You may want to advertise a few more horse-oriented products, such as stable blankets, cute paddock boots, etc. Or, if you don't want to go with equestrian products, I will buy multiple boxes of Uncle Ben's, which I think I saw on the show this evening. I will do this even though I prefer jasmine long grain rice. That's how much I love this show.

Thank you for your time. I hope you find these arguments as fundamentally irrefutable and iron-clad as I do.

www.petitiononline.com

I Can't Believe We're Still Watching

A conversation about The Apprentice.

James: I can't stand that Alex guy.

Susan: Me neither.

J: The minute that eyebrow of his goes up, I just want to punch him.

S: Me too.

J: They're all useless.

S: I know! The entire show is a disgusting celebration of materialism.

J: But I'd hire that blonde woman in a minute. Angie, too.

S: They're the only two worth anything. Them and Kendra.

J: I'd hire those two to run my businesses.

S: Don't you just have the one business?

J: Yeah, but if I had other ones, I'd be totally comfortable with them running them. Totally comfortable. But not Alex.

S: Definitely not Alex.

Later, after the Hair (as Miss Alli has timelessly referred to Donald Trump) has fired Angie of the Bold Streaks.

J: This show sucks. Donald Trump has lost all credibility.

S: He's gone too far.

J: I'm tempted to stop watching.

S: Me too.

J: You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see that guy who freaks out and chews snuff win. Just so Alex doesn't.

S: That would be good.

J: Alex. I still can't believe he likes Alex.

S: Alex. That damned Alex and his eyebrow.

Sunshine Sketch

I was so thrilled to learn that Miss Smithers has been chosen as a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour that words failed me and I was forced to draw a picture. A sunshine sketch, as a matter of fact.



If you are one of those people who looks closely at sunshine sketches, you might ask yourself -- is that a little person or another piece of median/brownish rectangle-y thing, in the foreground? Way to notice, gentle reader! That odd little figure in the foreground is the statue of a man blowing an alpenhorn that stands at the entrance to Smithers' charmingly cobbled Main Street. That's right, an alpenhorn, not a giant golf club, cricket bat, hockey stick or sporting utensil of any kind. An alpenhorn. Every town should have one. If you are at all civic-minded, you may want to approach your Chamber of Commerce about having one installed. I'm just saying...

Catch the Spirit

One of the great things about being a horse owner is that I get to interact with a farrier. If you haven't had the pleasure, a farrier is the person who puts shoes on horses. Formerly known as blacksmiths, farriers hark back to the old school. They tend to be burly and competent and given to facial hair. They wear leather chaps and unlike 95% percent of people who wear those fascinating garments, they actually need them.

A few days ago I got to meet Tango's new farrier. The man was everything I hoped for. His name is Erl. Yes, that's right. Earl without the "a". If you think about it, those three letters are really all you need to get the thing pronounced correctly. This is exactly the kind of no-nonsense approach to things I associate with farriers.

Erl (I may never get over how much I approve of that name) has a very good moustache and looks satisfyingly outdoorsy. He was accompanied by an Australian shepard dog who wore a bandana, not in a fey, affected way, but rather in an I'm-the-dog-of-a-farrier-you-never-know-when-we-might-need-this kind of way. Erl drove a big truck. How satisfying to meet someone who drives a big truck who actually needs one!

Erl is not only very knowledgable, but he is also given to dry comments. He examined Tango's feet carefully and talked to him kindly. Later, as I tried Tango's new cooler rug on him, I asked Elena, whose pony was getting a hoof trim, what she thought.

"Hey, Elena! What do you think of the new cooler?"

"Oh, it's nice," she replied.

"You don't think it makes Tango look like eurotrash?"

"No. Well, maybe he looks a bit metrosexual."

"Does he look like a Fiat?"

"---?"

"You know, do the stripes make him look like a mechanically-suspect sportscar?"

Suddenly, Erl, who'd been bent over his work, and hadn't appeared to be listening, spoke up.

"I'm thinking he looks more like a BC Ferry."

Elena and I both stared, struck by the truth of his words. The blue blanket with its white and green accents did make Tango look like one of our BC ferries.

"Yup. You could call him Spirit of Nanaimo."

That's when I knew I had the right farrier for Spirit of Nanaimo.