Fishiness at Whole Foods

I was walking past Whole Foods on 4th Avenue the other day and noticed that they were selling farmed fish ... but it was "responsibly" farmed fish. What will they be selling next? "Responsibly" genetically modified foods?

Election signs

What I find laughable is that where there is a sign for some election candidate with a Chinese name on someone's lawn in Vancouver, you can bet your bottom dollar that the people who live in this house are Chinese. And if there is some "South Asian" candidate's sign on a lawn, the people living in the house are "South Asian." On the other hand, if the people have a sign of Gregor Robertson on their lawn, they are just idiots.

Only a month till the Vancouver civic election...

Vancouver NPA mayoral candidate Kirk LaPointe is white bread to Gregor Robertson's multigrain bread. He is bland and boring, bending over backwards to be Mr. Nice Guy because of the nasty stuff the NPA did regarding Gregor's split from his wife.

I think it is a waste of time voting for either him or Meena Wong, though many will as a protest against Gregor. They are likely going to split the vote and Gregor will get in as mayor no matter how much people hate him and his ideas.

The only hope is to elect some new people other than the usual Vision majority to city council. For example, newcomer (at least to council) Nikki Sharma should not be elected. Remember when she was the boss of the parks board and there was a meeting about the community centres which went until the early morning and then the parks board turned around voted the way they wanted anyway?

COPE's Tim Louis should definitely be on council because he likes to make trouble and he will be a bug up Gregor's ass. And more Green people should be there too.

Meena has some good ideas, though she is tainted with the "Commie COPE" stigma (remember what happened to the NDP's Gabriel Yiu versus Suzanne Anton in Vancouver South during the provincial election?). I think Meena should have run for council rather than mayor. She would have been elected in a landslide.

London Drugs should get a prize for being funny...

East Fraser Lands Development Shows Vision Vancouver's "Green" Hypocrisy

The East Fraser Lands development (located in the southeast corner of Vancouver near Boundary Road and Marine Way) really puts the lie to Vision Vancouver's "green" agenda:

http://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/clearcut-east-fraser-lands/

http://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/dewilding-rewilding-river-district/ 

Sure, they are planting lots of new trees and bushes as per the official city WWW pages outlining the development (http://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/east-fraser-lands-efl-policies-and-guidelines.aspx) but what happened to the hundreds, if not thousands of old trees that were cut down? Did developers have to pay the usual "blood money" for cutting down trees? I doubt it. And what happened to all the trees that were trucked out of the area?

See also this WWW page:

http://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/east-fraserlands-udp-june18/ 

"The illustration in the agenda shows that land earmarked for development was a woodlot. This is in stark contrast to the barren land south of East Kent Avenue. It may seem a little ironic that the City of Vancouver recently passed a tree removal bylaw and has a “greenest city” policy in place, yet the City approved clear-cutting a section of forest."

One of these pages above mentions the "development permit" type sign about the deforestation which was planted on one of the side streets where no one will notice it. I took a picture of this sign (above) when it was previously posted at the edge of the former forest on the south side of Marine Way between Kinross and Boundary months ago. This sign was placed along a stretch of road where you cannot legally stop and there was no sidewalk so you could just walk down the street and see it.

How to shrink the Internet

If WWW pages that start with numbers, i.e., "10 Weird Facts About," "10 Most Scenic Roadtrips," "12 Terrible Mistakes," etc., were banned, the total number of WWW pages on the Internet would probably drop considerably.

Fishy business at the Aquarium

What bugs me about the people bitching about the captivity of whales and dolphins at the Vancouver Aquarium is that they are complaining because the aquarium keeps these animals, which are mammals (just like us) that are cute, or, more likely, "smart."

What do these people think about other fish and animals in the aquarium which are not "smart," i.e., they are "dumb," relatively speaking?

I don't get the sense these people's attitude is "let's start with the smart whales and dolphins, and if we are successful at discouraging their presence in aquariums and/or liberating them, we will then move on to the other fish and animals."

It's no great secret that all animals and fish in zoos and suffer STRESS. Remember the pacing polar bears in Stanley Park?

I wonder why we need zoos and aquariums at all, when you can easily see animals and fish in books and on the Internet.