Excellent points, Fiat Lux. It's heartening to hear that not everyone can be turned into good little consumer-dependants. Myself, I'm very far from having the self-sufficient skills so that I can, with little fear and anxiety, give the proverbial finger to this market driven madness we're all subject to. However, I will be sure that my children are brought up "good and proper", that is, never beholden to the whims and fancies of consumer culture. They will learn to stand on their own, whether it be in a small village, a commune, the East Side, West Side or wherever.

As someone who spent the first 20 years of my life in rural or small town BC I agree with what fiat lux says. What sent me packing to the Big City was lack of employment. But I have always wished to return to the small town way of life, which is, in most ways, superior to that of the large urban centers. I consider it madness on the part of our rulers to herd us all into half a dozen or so large urban areas. Of course, it makes sense from their point of view - we are easier to control and exploit in this manner.

Here in Vancouver, high fuel prices have threatened delivery of foods and consumer goods to stores. My ability to hunt and gather(shop for groceries) is threatened and it forces one to think: how can an apple brought from New Zealand compete with an apple from Enderby?
Safeway's produce department is profitable, despite a 27% spoilage rate. This is appalling waste, even if only the cost of the fuel used to bring it to market is considered. A litre of fuel requires a litre of water in the refining process, which is wasted. Some nth percent of our air was polluted with no benefit to anyone as the litres were burned. Et cetera.
Communities within cities are pushing back. My community is striving to become a fair trade zone and with the resources the net provides, along with the energy of locals, places that do business as Safeway does will be forced to evolve or lose their market.

The population of BC is approx 4 million: over 3 million urban and less than 1 million rural. Of the less than one million considered rural, including the 5000 living on the Charlottes and the 350+/- living near Big Lake, only 10,000 actually live on farms, the other 60,000 are considered urban farm population.

So, if we do away with fraudulent neoclassical economics, mindless media, specialization, automation and the rest of the ills associated with city life identified by Ed, and opt for locally based economic systems (as opposed to a globalized economic system??) what do we do with three million urban dwellers?

I suppose they could move and join the 60,000 folks considered urban farm dwellers but the big city problem of jobs, income levels, food, transportation, pollution, education, health care ad nauseam would still exist. I’m sure that, even in Big Lake and the Charlottes, locals can only produce so much dirty laundry to keep the economy going.

Ed, though I agree with your list of social ills faced by today’s societies, I don’t buy the causes (with the exception of interference run by the ruling elite) you’ve identified. Economic theory, automation, specialization, etc., are responses to demands placed by society, they don’t cause those demands.

The problem is that cities make a lot of sense, environmentally. I agree with the cultural criticism but surely the answer is to change the culture in the cities! It can happen.

I also agree that the economic system, combined with media, has resulted in a BS 'popular culture'. But fuck popular culture. In this way, I disagree that that the economic system is determinative. With enough good people and creativity, we can do our best to 'nudge' culture in a more wnlightened direction.

For this reason I also disagree with the idea that small towns must be left due to their employment situation. Now I'm not stupid. I'm from uber-small town BC. However, with enough creativity, you can create opportunities.

I've worked in all regions of BC and spent good quality time is the best and worst of small town BC. And there are very few that have no hope. Those that do (resource towns that are ALSO in ugly/illogical places) will have to fall. But the vast majority have some kind of magic, and BC will likely continue to grow in global popularity as a destination to visit and live.

As a small town boy who has been working/travelling/studying for 11 years since I left my small town, I have at least gotten far enough away to be simplied awed at every memory from every one of those towns.

So in response to the comments and the article, I say you just gotta leave for a while. Pick up some skills, get educated; then move back to the unequaled magic that is living, and raising kids, in rural British Columbia.

I enjoy visiting the sticks once in a while; it's the only place to really enjoy motocrossing, hunting, cetera and cetera.

But rural life is essentially doomed. The raison d'etre is not the quality of life, but the fact that you used to be able to get work there. Now you can't. And who would want it?

I'm getting the picture that Fiat pines for the glories of an imaginary pre-industrial (pre-germ theory, pre-Internet, and pre-democractic) utopia in which the noble peasant gambolled about their commune, taking it in turns to act as an executive officer for the week.

Them nasty machines supplanted human labour. Yes, they did! Many fewer humans are consigned to mule-like lives of backbreaking toil in the fields, mines, factories and abattoirs.

If you think that's a bad thing, my friend, you just ain't done it.

Yup, these rural (and displaced city) people need something to do. Maybe it'll be arts and culture, the dawn of a new renaissance. Why not? I think that's a lot more likely than persuade anyone that it is preferable to throw our sabot into the works for the chance to scrabble in noble filth.

I won't get into too many details of my life experience, let's just say I'm 78, grew up during the depression in East Europe, by 17 I had 5 years of military training and was in the army as a battalion staff master marksman detailed to a heavy machinegun squad to protect the guns from infiltrators and snipers. Wounded in action in 1945, ,POW, have lived in 4 countries under every known political system. Sentenced to death by the nazis, to the gulags by the communists. Apart from academic studies at Cambridge, and classical art training, I'm also qualified in several trades, can design and build a house, install all the plumbing and electrics, design and build all the furniture in any style from Chippendale to Chinese modern, paint all the pictures on the walls and carve the sculptures. Weld, fabricate, build machinery etc. Then, just for the fun of it, bring me some economics professor and watch me crucify him, or her, in a public debate. By the way, English was my 5th language and have never spent a single hour in any English class.

In other words, my friend, I have done it and can still do a lot most people can't even dream of. So unless you can beat my record, please be very careful in what you say.

My point is that the present forced urbanization is accomplished with the use of literally unlimited energy inputs into inefficient systems, which is not ecologically sustainable. I've been working with and am in daily contact with some of the top scientific names in the field of sustainable economics and hold the 1991 copyright on the only scientifically correct and unbreakable definition of economic efficiency.

I don't know how the cities will be dismantled and the people resettled in efficient life styles, but I know that it can be done and also how it can be done. It may take a major economic collapse, or catastrophe, but the present huge cities are not economically , or ecologically sustainable and will self destruct, because there won't be enough energy or water to keep them going. The official water consumption (now I'm using the word) is 1400 US gallons per person per day for each city dweller an there ain't not enough water to keep it going forever. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Yammer sez we should maybe have us a new renaissance. Hot doggies! I can hardly wait.

I'm afraid it's much more likely to be a new dark age. People are poorly adapted to large groups. Ideal group size for humans seems to be around 250. At that level we can identify and empathize with others. Work together.

At 25,000,000 we get stupid. We discriminate, we hate, we pursue idiotic self-destructive policies. We think that if we steal food from others so we can be fat while they die of hunger, that's progress. We start thinking that if we stop educating children, we'll be better off keeping the money for ourselves. Or that 40% poverty rates are perfectly all right, and it's their own fault.

Technology provides an opportunity to move economic activities out of centralized cities, and carry it out in smaller communities, thus spreading wealth and worthy satisfying lives for the whole society. Cities reduce the general prosperity of the society, concentrating it in the hands of a few, who then start to believe these false premises.

It makes us all poorer when rural culture withers and dies.

Right on, Bailey. This people-herding is pure insanity.

“I don't know how the cities will be dismantled and the people resettled in efficient life styles, but I know that it can be done and also how it can be done.” Ed, I’m not sure I understand this comment; either you know or you don’t. But I suspect, aside from your life experiences, you’re like the rest of us, and it’s the latter.

Whatever the mechanisms (disease, war, hunger or any combination), and whatever the rate involved in effecting population redistribution and abundance, as dwindling resources make their absence felt, you can be sure that farmers and farm communities will not be immune to the process. As you’ve witnessed in your lifetime, the human animal is capable of doing whatever it takes to survive. Some city folk have developed some very ingenious survival techniques.

Unless we move further and further into a police state (anti terrorist laws: U$ Homeland Security and Bills C38 and 39 in Canada are just the beginning) the ‘have-nots’ will swarm the ‘haves’ like prairie locusts in a grain field.

Bailey, we learn discrimination, hatred and self-destructive behaviour in the first five or six years of life; the rest of life is devoted to reinforcement of that learning. The source of that “learning” is from family and peers. It has nothing to do with population size. It is likely that population size merely magnifies; makes it more noticeable and the outcomes more severe.

Though my life has been about evenly divided between cities and agriculture/small towns, I have some differences with Fait Lux in his take on cities, and though they need serious scaling down, as centres of science, arts, research and the pivot points of trade that will still need to go on, I think cites will continue to have a variety of important functions, even in a more rational social model. If we can ever successfully get shuck of current capitalism and its fear and greed driven dynamics that is. (Already though, the dehumanizing and alienating aspects of cities like Vancouver even, itself actually on the smaller end of really big international mega-cities, are inescapable-, at all those points where "the rot" can't be hidden. Vancouver's anus is right there, in full bouquet, at Hastings and Main, for example.)

Even driving into Vancouver, a week or so ago, starting at about Hope already, one could feel the pace,stress and tension begin to build, until by the big Surrey Centre flag's sighting and the Port Mann Bridge, when you knew that you were full into the total insanity of the place. Anyway, the heebie-jeedies even thinking about it. (Kamloops isn't a whole hell of a lot better, or Kelowna, prime example of the dog's breakfast upchuck model of urban capitalist development, and increasingly, the similar spewed out across the landscape model of the Okanagan Valley in its entirety.)

But even while acknowleding that, in the ideal reduced "population level world", where hopefully the "frear and greed" drive of a capitalist society has also been moved beyond, there will still be the place and need for cities, hopefully some diminished in number and scale, and "suck" upon rural and real smaller town areas ,I much identify with what Fait says, but especially Bailey. (This latter who continues to have the capacity to pleasantly surprise me. :-)

He has the scale about right, in my view, but especially he has the decentralizing aspect or potential of technology about right, as a means of the possible spreading of wealth and vitality around, especially back to smaller, much smaller urban areas.

The genie of technology is out of the bottle, and as a species, I don't think we are suddenly going to pretend that it doesn't have its uses, and positive as well as negative potentials, such that we are going to turn away from it. Evolution will have to strike us down as a species for that to occur, I think. And that is always possible. Still, there is no going back, for us, I don't think, to some idealized past that never really entirely existed anyway.

But there are things that we can and need to do. It starts with expanding the place and role of democracy in ALL our political and economic institutions. That gives ordinary folks greater control over these outcomes everywhere. Additionally, there needs to be an encouraging and further making it possible and easier for girls and women to control birth rates, in all societies, and once having hopefully tamed the "fear and greed" beast that we have so allowed to dominate our societies, and hopefully having got control over religious and extreme political zealotry, to begin to make it possible for small towns and farming to prosper again. Making these areas more attractive, and thus, in addition to reduced populations generally, over time, will assist small town life and farming communities to further draw even more people back and away from the urban obesity of mega-cities, back closer at least, to the land to which we remain connected, even if we have lost sight of the fact. (Lynn, earlier, made some good points on this score. Maybe in another discussion, now that I think about it.)

It may all still ring like a fantasy somewhat, but eh! If one dares not to dream, there is only the abyssmal present and its ever diminishing prospects and inequalities. Besides , the thing with these kinds of "fantasy creations" is, they need much working upon by many minds and experiences, to hammer and hew them into a shape that more reflects reality and real possibilities. (Which never means one just blindly has to accept what is.)

[And eh, I have been fortunate in being able to avoid an actual war, though I have been close enough on two occassions to smell the napalm burning, but I did my first live ammunition military "beach landing" exercise at the age of sixteen. I started at fourteen in "cadets", was in the Regina Rifles Regiment of reserves, and served almost a full hitch in the military-, until we "mutually agreed" that I should leave, for the good of the service. :-) So, though I've been able to get to here without killing or being killed, thankfully, military experience, at some level, was a common experience of nealy all young males of my class and time.

Being as its important to some. ;-]

Outside of that, my education was confined pretty much to shovelling critter manure and monkey wrenching, learned from old timers.

Though I've wiped the odd human's ass as well, given them enemas, and drove catheters into their penises. I've also tied their toes together, stuffed their ass with cotton batten, tied off their dicks, stuck 'em into a body bag and put them in the fridge for the undertaker. I've got few illusions.

Cooking I grew into from the need to feed myself when the old man was at work. Otherwise, he did the cooking and cleaning. Ma wasn't much more than a basket case, pretty much ever.

My degree is as a Doctor of SFS, or "Street and Farmyard Smarts, written fancy and in Pig Latin on a piece of asswipe. :-)

If you're worried about the collapse of civilization, here's a handy tip: some religious groups store up food for such an eventuality. Find out where these folks live!

I should have been clearer with my comment on the dismantling of the cities. What I meant was that I don't know what the final straw will be and how it will happen? Even those of us who've been working for years to bring down the USSR couldn't imagine that it will collapse with a whimper. The ways and means of the end are completely unpredictable. But that the collapse will happen is absolutely certain, as the world's ecology can not support the huge energy/water etc. demands of mega cities forever. This is why the USA is so desperate to get our water, when even our own cities are beginning to run short.

The aberration of logic of mega cities has been caused and created by the present false definition of economic efficiency, encouraging growing waste and incompetence for monetary gains by a special interest sector. I won't go into this now, but I've ben working on this for 20 years, so I have learned a few things in the subject .

It is also obvious that when the breakdown will occur, rural people will be equally affected, because incompetence and the reliance on bought foods, products and services doesn't stop at city limits. We know people who own thousands of acres with hundreds of cattle, yet, have to buy their vegetables at Safeway, because they don't have even small home gardens and don't know how to grow anything. Some even buy their beef in the store, instead of eating their own.
Hardly anybody has chickens. Even in this small community, of about 300, we know people who won't eat farmfresh eggs, because the yolks are "too orange" and so they pay high prices for pale factory eggs at the supermarkets.

So, there will be trouble and suffering all around. The biggest concern is the potential for armed gangs combing the countryside for food and survival items. With all the guns around this could easily happen. We don't get any home invasions around here, because we all have dogs who'd warn us of anybody coming and we all have guns, as ranchers legally permitted to have at least one at the ready and know how to use them.

I'm a very peaceful man, I don't hunt and even when I have to protect my cattle, or chickens I'd sooner scare off the predators, than shoot them. But if anybody'd try any violence against us, I would without the slightest hesitation. One more, or less on my conscience wouldn't make any difference.

We saw the collapse of Europe after WW2 and the aftermath. There were no gangs and no violence, but we all were starving and millions were living in ruins in flattened cities for years. I had to live for 6 years in barracks and camp conditions, before we could get married and started to build a home.

What saved Europe from the total collapse of civilization were the farm and tradespeople, who, at the time still could make something from nothing and grow things without huge energy inputs. They know how to use simple tools and their heads. That was when I decided that no matter how much education I may get, I will one day learn a trade. My opportunity came when came to Vancouver and an old English cabitetmaker took me on as an apprentice at the age of 28. After that I couldn't learn enough to this day. Unfortunately, creative people are a dying breed. My wife tried to teach crafts to some local women, free of charge, for 12 years, but they didn't learn practically anything, so she gave up. It was only a few hours of socializing for them and "What do we do next?".

So, let's hope that before a catastrophic crash, some politicians will get enough brains together and start thinking about the inevitability of having to do something, regardless of what the stockmarkets may do.

Of course, we do need cities, just as we need large and small businesses, but we can not permit the growth of parasitical systems infinitely, especially when their cancerous growth threatens the survival of the human race. What benefit did Mexico get from 1.5 million survival farm families forced into shanty towns by NAFTA, even if it increased their fraudulent GDP ?

Also, of course, people enjoy parasitical lifestyles, none of us are immune to the addiction of consumerism, but under the present economic systems humanity is rapidly becoming seagulls feeding off garbage dumps instead of doing the jobs they were created for.

I'll return to Coyote's very interesting comments either later tonight, or in the morning. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Very interesting piece, Fait. Looking forward to what else you may have on the subject.

I've worked as a hired hand on more than one of these kinds of farms and ranches, from Saskatchewan to BC. They all should have had a sign over the farm gate that read, "Don't Eat The Meat". (Though, at the time, we didn't know everything we do now, about a lot of "industrial" farming practice.Still, even then, sometimes there were suspicions that nagged at our minds. A certain "uncomfortableness.")

We always ate our own critters, but sometimes, one wasn't always too sure what was in the store "bought" cattle and chicken feed. In the end, we fed our cattle to "feeder" weight on our grass and hay, and what the market fed through those we sold after that, on presumably one of these huge manure pile feedlots that you can smell miles ahead of seeing it, is anybody's guess.

We finished those we would consume ourselves, in addition to good quality hay, on a ration of plain grain for about six weeks, to marble and flavour the meat, Which I always thought, and still do, produces a superior quality and taste over straight grass fed, which I find tends a little to the "tough" and "gamey" side. Still, it beats Creutzfeldt-Jakob beef all to hell. :-) (And always having a few milk cows around, what we didn't use, we put through the pigs we would consume. Milk fed pork!!! We spoiled them, but they were Mmmmm, good! I can still taste those critters. And liver from your own fresh killed beef!!! Tasteeee!

Now see, there I go waxing all nostalgic over the ancient rite of the slaughter. :-)

I'm a firm believer in ESP. There's no escape from it and we all experience and practice it every day. We think, or talk of somebody and the phone rings with him, or her, on the line, or a letter arrives, or the person walks in. Happens all the time to everybody and there are many different manifestations of the phenomena.

We bought some lakeshore lots in the Cariboo in 1969, when we were still living in Vancouver and then built a cabin on one. It was still an uninhabited subdivision at the time and our first experience with real solitude. We began to notice that after we spent some time at the lake and were heading back to Vancouver, when the vista of the Greater Vancouver area opened up at the top of the hill, going down to the Port Mann bridge, it was like being hit in the chest with depression. We asked other people at the lake and they all had the same feeling. We concluded that what hit us was the combined ESP of a million unhappy souls screaming for help.

We now have lived out here in isolation for 26 years. It took us about 5 years to really become part of the landscape. The nearest town, Williams Lake, is 55 km, a 45 minute drive from here. We try to go only twice a month to save time and gas. In the meantime we sometimes don't see anybody for a week, or two. Our nearest neighbours are about 1 km from us.

We are up at 6 and go to bed at 11, always working on something, but although we may get tired a bit, we don't feel down. However, when we go to town to do our shopping, we get completely worn out and many times, after we come home and unload the truck we have to lie down for a rest. Other people who commute to town to work feel nothing unusual, but those who live similar lifestyles to ours, feel exactly the same way as we do, tired and worn out after a few hours in town.

The only conclusion we can come up with that by living alone out in the country we get away from the influence of the ESP of the crowds, buy when we get exposed, we pick it up and it wears us down. This is not only our opinion, but shared by everybody we know.

This brings up the question, how much the ESP of sick minds influences the decision making processes of any group, management, club, etc? Especially of so called think tanks and legislatures, where the influence of some crazy people with strong ESP powers, like Hitler, or Mao, or any political leader, can actually push people into the wrong direction, criminal acts and disasters? How about the power of "great orators" , preachers, and leaders ? Where does it come from?

Political and economic ideologies are usually the results of group thinking, influenced by powerful, but often sick minds. The mass hysteria of crowds, fundamentalist religions, political conventions, are always the result of forms of mass hypnosis caused by ESP.

Is it then any wonder that human history always keeps repeating itself with the most horrible results ?

As I wrote before, we do need cities, or even political leaders, for certain purposes, within limits, but if I never see another large city in my life, it will be too soon. Ed Deak, Big Lake.

Indeed, an interesting take, Fait. Ain't no question but there is the this strange, in the gut feeling that hits, I mistakenly thought perhaps just me and the Mrs., when one breaks out into the open there, coming down onto the Port Mann.

I immediately look off, over there to that mass of cheek by jowl housing development that is... What's it called? Mary Hill? ...and it jolts me everytime, like a hit of nausea. What a sanity foresaken pile of humanity that place is-, devoid of anything that resembles nature, that is whatsoever apparent. No, I'm wrong. I immediately think, "Ant hill!" Which is nature.

One does adjust some, of course, because one has to, but what an initial unpleasant scream comes up out of that place of lost souls, as one immediately begins to jostle and jockey for position going onto the Port Mann, like scattergun pellets being shot out of a blunderbuss. I'm still amazed that I actually survived driving a transit bus there, for all those strange, alienated years.

It was like living in a great, overcrowded slaughterhouse stockyard, with its controlling systems of cattle chutes and holding pens.

"Moooo! Moooooo!"

Oh well, it put us together enough of a pension that while, like yourself, we couldn't have afforded to stay there ourselves, even if we'd wanted to, it is enough to survive quite nicely in much preferable Small Town.

And I can hear folks saying now, in skeptical disbelief, " A big Union paid bus driver couldn't afford to live in Vancouver?!!?"

Well, there's all kinds of stories come out of the Big City, and when that "union paycheque" stops coming, and you take the "hit" in income you do, when you retire, unless you just want to live for your home as your raison d'etre, you better have an alternative plan. (And me, though not the old lady, I could be no less happy in a tar paper covered shack.) And I know, there's folks who can and do live out of dumpsters, sleep in cardboard boxes, and take the odd bowl of soup from Harbourlights, but that wasn't the option I was working on, if I could avoid it.

As it is, I've got a whole wilderness a short bicycle ride away, that is within easy sight and sound all around me, where I can play the big nature photographer, and play with the bugs, birds and critters of my youth. Hell, I never buy more than I can pay for, keep my "expectations" and appetites to a low threshold, save for the single malt whiskey of course, and have zero debts to keep my nose to the grindstone-, which for me, I'm back in the Garden of Eden.

For so long as my health stays good. :-) Even in paradise, there is always a catch.

ESP and group think! You might have something there Ed.

Although not quite as exciting as ESP, I’m a firm believer in BHSR (Basic Human Survival Response), or its simpler form, APSP (Avoid Pain, Seek Pleasure). Although it doesn’t explain those phone calls or letters from someone you were recently thinking of, or their sudden arrival, it probably explains many events in our lives, including depressing trips from Shangri La over the Port Mann and into Dante’s Inferno.

That sense of depression you feel when you approach the Port Mann probably starts at Big Lake the night before you climb into your auto and head south: A restless night’s sleep coupled with a lack of appetite in the morning - because you’re mind, at a non conscious level, has been mulling the dreaded ordeal all night - starts working on the body.

Once ‘on the road’ you are forced to deal with increasing sensory input: more traffic, more hazards, road rage, lousy driving weather or any number of events that you don’t normally deal with. The tension builds.

By the time you get to Cache Creek your heart rate is elevated, the BP rises and you are doing a little hyperventilation. This is when you start to notice a few of those unhappy souls screaming for help so you stop at Hungry Herby’s for a break and a coffee. Unfortunately that’s just the beginning of the body’s efforts to protect you during this painful trip.

Of course the coffee break is only temporary relief. You still have a long way to go and still have to face a huge increase in sensory input.

At Hope the pain of hearing those unhappy souls is starting to become more noticeable. Traffic is coming at you from all sides and you wish you had eyes in the back of head. By now your BP has been elevated for several hours. The body’s large muscle groups are tense. The rapid breathing, combined with too much caffeine and too little sleep, is starting to alter your blood chemistry. Your thinking is becoming mildly impaired.

From Hope to the Port Mann there is a gradual buildup of adrenalin and the blood chemistry is altered significantly. What started as heightened sensory input now becomes sensory overload. Tense muscles are suffering from acid buildup and you notice that your shoulders and neck are starting send you painful messages. Your grip on the steering wheel is so great you’ve created depressions in the plastic covering and your hands are sweaty.

As the vista of Greater Vancouver opens up at the top of the hill, on the approach to the Port Mann, millions of unhappy muscle fibers start screaming for relief. That "in the gut feeling" tells you that the body has reached its limit in its ability to deal with the sensory overload, elevated adrenalin and harmful levels of toxins in the blood. You are in pain; physically and emotionally.

Now you’re in the thick of it. The ‘flight or fight’ response is suppressed. You are surrounded by vehicles of all sizes and shapes, and there is no escape. All you can do now is yield to basic survival instincts; and survival dictates that you concede. You have yielded to the cities powerful group-think environment.

Of course, while all of this physiological stuff was going on, the mind was working overtime and compounding the problem. As you are driving along criticizing the road hogs, crowded city life, the media, automation, politicians, neoclassical economists and Hitler you are adding to the pain load (all criticism is pain related, if it didn’t have a pain component we wouldn’t use it).

The impaired thinking of a depressed mind is just waiting for the next command from the furor.

Ooops. Try Fuhrer ...

I "sensed" you were out there, KWD. Feeling a little competitive are we? :-D

Whatever its mechanical/physiological root, and I don't disagree with Pavlovian theory-, actually accept its over-arching validity as an explanation for human behavioural responses. Nonetheless, regardless of its working in the background, not entirely unlike old DOS in Windows, ESP still works. Just not in "some other" spiritual, hocus pocus realm.

Which reminds me. Victoria sucks as well. Where I was during this same Vancouver trip. It only looks and feels better compared to Vancouver, otherwise it's in the same handbasket bound for Hell. (Capitalism eventually fucks everything it touches, bar none. Unless there is no dollar potential.)

Victoria is about on a level with the Okanagan-, in terms of degree of being spewed out across what was a beautiful landscape.

And you didn't need to make the "fuhrer" correction. "Furor" worked just as well-, nay, better. :-)

Eh people, it's Saturday night and "the mood" is on me. And I'm hearing a 10 year old bottle of Glenmorangie calling my name. (Momma's happy, 'cause I made her favourite bran muffins and foccicia bread today, so I've got a little brownie point latitude here, that I think I will take advantage of. :-)

A man has to keep his woman happy. :-)

Catch ya's upon the 'morrow.

That'z "foccacia". I swear, sometimes I think this Tyee programming mis-spells words, in translation.

Couldn't be me?

Nah. No way. :-)