Winter Olympics Vancouver 2010

[Kanada Kev]

heard he was at the women's gold medal game. Bet he'll be there for the Gold Medal game today too (he likes his Sharks).

Rumour has it that he could be one of the performers at the closing ceremonies today too (along with Nickelback ::barf:: and Avril Lavine ::barf:: )

Edited February 28, 2010 by Guest

[nibbler]

Rumour has it that he could be one of the performers at the closing ceremonies today too (along with Nickelback ::barf:: and Avril Lavine ::barf:: )

This Note's For You would be classic!

[bradm]

The Vancouver Games: A Gold in Drinking

These are the fourth Olympics I've covered, and Vancouver drinks Athens, Torino and Beijing under the table. I asked a few Olympic journalists who have covered more Games than I have to rate Vancouver on the intoxication scale. Vahe Gregorian of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who has covered eight Olympics, dating back to Atlanta in 1996, agreed with my chart-topping assessment. In reference to downtown Vancouver's main strip of nightclubs, he said: "Granville Street itself is unlike anything I've seen at an Olympics." And he noted that all the drinking in Vancouver has led to a lot of public urinating. "I've personally witnessed about 8-10 guys whizzing at once along a fence a half a block off the main street," he said. "It's like the infield at the Kentucky Derby."

Bonnie D. Ford, who is covering the Games for espn.com, has been to every Winter Olympics since 1998 in Nagano. "There's no second place," she said when asked where Vancouver ranks on the booze barometer. (In fairness, you can pretty much strike from this debate Salt Lake City, the abstemious host of the 2002 Olympics.) Her hotel is near Granville Street, close enough to hear the "Can-a-da, Can-a-da" shouts at 3 am. "It's been a two-week tailgate," she said. "I've covered a lot of college football, and this is like the Dante's Inferno version of tailgating."

Aloha,

Brad

Edited February 28, 2010 by Guest
Add quote.

[Kanada Kev]

[Guest Low Roller]

Today the madness known as Usher and his posse invade the MOD stage (thankfully, he's not performing).

I saw the Usher performance on TV. It was hilariously bad. The crowd was completely dead to his antics. I was proud to be Canadian.

[nibbler]

[Deeps]

Wow - the above video is really interesting.

My feelings on this situation are extremely difficult to well ... feel.

You have essentially 1000s of people in this neighbourhood that are demanding housing, but who would rent to them? What's the incentive?

I have researched residential schools and the continuing fallout that besets the poor people who were victimized by them, and how they have migrated to the Dowtown East Side. It's difficult to hear about and watch and troubling that the people who were responsible haven't been brought to justice; I truly hope that they see justice for this in our lifetime. Though the reality is that the damage is done and pretty irreversible.

The here and now of it all is that you have real people who in real practical ways are some of the worst tenants on the continent and create unsafe and unsavoury environments for anybody else. What right does anyone have when they can't live by even the lowest standards as it is. Would building them more housing make things better or would you simply have more places that are living nightmares and in ruins? What is the incentive to build this housing?

The woman citing the death of 12 people in the last year due to homelessness is for me a little too emphatic/aghast. If you were living in an a pack and not living in a way that was conducive to your pack surviving you would be marginalized, eventually walk alone and likely not survive much longer: is this not just how it works? - though as I've outlined above the circumstances that have these folks arrive on the streets aren't necessarily there own doing and continue to be quite tragic.

Like I said my feelings are hard to feel and by no means concrete - I say these things in the hope that someone with a different perspective may be able to show me how simply providing housing is going to fix anything, and why it is a Right?

If this debate needs to continue maybe it's not in this thread.

An aside:

I also wonder how much the games stimulated the economy ... restaurants nation wide rammed for the final hockey game etc. and if that has an impact on those saying the money should not have been put toward it because on ly the rich were benefactors....my local pub owner had a hell of a Sunday! ... I'm rambling.