On Sunday, a hundred and ten people met at the Vancouver Community College with the shared hope of electing Gregor Robertson mayor. Robertson told the crowd of seeing a homeless man sleeping in the alley behind Cambie Street inside a rain soaked sleeping bag and said this was the kind of thing that made him want to be mayor.

It cost nearly $70 to fill up the tank of a Jetta station wagon.

Alarmist headlines in the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail warned of food shortages and waning oil supplies and an unsustainable socio-economic system and environmentalists shook their heads and said, “Really?”

At the BC Book Prize awards at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, The Honourable Steven L. Point, Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia entered the room preceded by a bagpipe brigade. The event began with a toast to the Queen. The 100-mile Diet, by J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith won the Roderick Hait-Brown regional prize. Forage, by Rita Wong won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Ian McAllister and Greystone Books won The Bill Duthie award for The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Great Bear Rainforest. The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Pollly Horvath won the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize. Mary Novik won the Fiction prize for her novel, Conceit. And the poet, Garry Geddes, won the Lieutenant Governor’s award for literary excellence. The lieutenant governor said in his speech that he didn’t know any writers personally.

I learned that north of Smithers, BC, First Nations people are battling Shell Oil Company. Shell Oil wants to harvest the gas reserves in the area. First it would be one pump, then another, then another. The media don't cover the fact that there is a blockade going on up there, because when news breaks, its too hard to get the video clips to Vancouver in time. By the time the clips arrive, it's no longer news.