For all his faults, he was such a gloriously theatrical torch singer!
Night Music: Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad
August 24, 2020
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Posted by jakking
Handydart : Ripping Off Poor Seniors
August 24, 2020HandyDart is a very useful system that helps those with mobility issues to travel about the City of Vancouver. I use it regularly for my scheduled hospital visits, and I have found the employees of the system — most especially the drivers — to be generally courteous, helpful and above all caring to the folks who use the system. However, for poor seniors it can be an expensive option.
Each one-way trip is $3:00, and so a return trip to the hospital costs $6.00. That may not sound like much but if you have two hospital trips a week, for dialysis say, and use the service to go shopping or to a seniors’ activity centre on another day, that comes to more than $70 a month — a fortune for many of us on low fixed-income pensions.
This problem could be solved if we could use our BC Provincial Bus Pass, but that is not allowed on HandyDart — and that needs to change.
In order to qualify for a BC Provincial Bus Pass, you must meet one of the following conditions:
- 60 years or older and the spouse of a person with the Person with Disabilities designation and are receiving disability assistance from the Province of British Columbia
- 60 years or older and receiving income assistance from the Province of British Columbia
- 60 years or older, living on a First Nations reserve and getting assistance from the band office
- 65 years or older and would qualify for the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) but does not meet the Canadian 10-year residency rule
- Receiving Old Age Security (OAS) and the GIS
In other words, to get a Pass you need to be a senior in poverty. To qualify to use HandyDart you must “have a physical, sensory, or cognitive disability and are unable to use conventional public transit without assistance” and get an accepted medical referral stating that disability.
Therefore, disallowing the use of the Bus Pass on HandyDart deliberately penalises disabled seniors in poverty.
I don’t know how many Vancouver residents qualify for both the Bus Pass and HandyDart, but it will not be a huge number; and the cost to the BC Treasury of changing the rules would be less than a drop in the bucket of the BC budget while significantly improving the lives of our most needy.
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Posted by jakking
Grandview 24th August 1920
August 24, 2020
Province, 19200824. p.2
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Poem: Dead Heroes
August 24, 2020
Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Brian Jones
And all those Grateful Rolling Mothers
Taught me that play is serious business
That play lives in the moment
That play is life
That an extended bluesy riff
Is infinitely more important than a timeclock
That a jiving rolling rock tune
Weighs so much more than a brand new car each year
So much more than a mortgage
And a closet of three-piece suits
That Janis Joplin was more beautiful than Ally MacBeal
That Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix
died for our sins
that their deaths preceeded ours by just a blink
in geological time
that if music be the food of love
I am obese with passion
That a great rythym guitar is better
Than bad sex
And that great sex is even better with rock and roll pounding in your head.
Play on, dead heroes
Play on and on and on ….
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Grandview 23rd August 1920
August 23, 2020
Province, 19200823, p.15
I am not sure if there was something wrong with this house, but in a generally fast-paced markert, I have found ads for it from at least February to November 1920. No price is ever mentioned, so perhaps that was the issue.
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Night Music: Pacabell’s Canon
August 22, 2020
A little more allegro than most versions. I like the fullness of it’s sound.
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We Are To Blame For The Billionaires
August 22, 2020Today, Bernie Sanders posted the following on Twitter:
It’s a true enough statement, and I entirely agree with Sanders that we need to tax billionaires out of existence. There are numerous progressives who post similar statements day after day. And none of them — none of them — ever refer to the fact that most billionaires are billionaires because we make them so.
It is a fact that some of their billions come from their ability to manipulate the tax system and workers’ rights to their advantage. But the vast majority of their wealth comes from us buying stuff we don’t really need from Amazon, giving eyeballs to advertizers on Facebook, and selling our privacy to cell phone makers and data cloud managers in return for so-called convenience.
If we stopped doing those things, billionaires would disappear like fog in the sunshine. But we are too damned lazy. We somehow expect the billionaire-sponsored politicians to create a tax system that will mildly ameliorate — not even solve — the problem for us. Are we really that stupid?
I’m no saint when it come to this stuff: I do occasionally buy from Amazon because I am too lazy to do otherwise. But I live a fairly productive and I hope useful life without a cell phone, without a Facebook account, without a Tesla (or, indeed, any car), and roughly 95% of all my monthly purchases are made on Commercial Drive where I live. I rarely even shop in Cedar Cottage or Hastings Sunrise because I believe so strongly in buying local and supporting local businesses.
We can blame the billionaires for being billionaires, we can blame politicians for the failures of capitalist inequality, but we damned well better blame ourselves most of all.
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Grandview 22nd August 1920
August 22, 2020
Vancouver Sun, 19200822, p.10
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Grandview 21st August 1920
August 21, 2020
Vancouver World, 19200821, p.2
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Night Music: Ne Me Quitte Pas
August 20, 2020
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Grandview 20th August 1920
August 20, 2020
Vancouver Sun, 19200820, p.11
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Grandview 19th August 1920
August 19, 2020
Province, 19200819, p.2
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Night Music: Done In The Dark
August 18, 2020
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Grandview 18th August 1920
August 18, 2020
Province 19200818, p.22
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To Be A Canadian
August 18, 2020
Thirty-four years ago today I became a Canadian citizen. perhaps the proudest and most satisfying day of my life. In about two months from now, I will have lived in Canada, in Vancouver, for forty-one years — much more than half my life.
These lengths of time seem strangely enormous to me looking back because I had had a quite long and interesting life (with wives and children and a career) in England and Europe before I ever came here. And that previous life — during the fascinating 1950s, 60s and 70s — now seems like a necessary and irreplaceable prologue to what my life became afterwards.
There were seriously important people and things that I left behind; but I don’t believe in regrets because they have no value. Even if I did, I cannot imagine that my life was anything but greatly enhanced by moving to Vancouver. I am still a proud Brit, an unreconstructed Welsh Londoner, but I am prouder still of being — by choice — a Vancouverite, of being Canadian.
Some content on this page was disabled on August 24, 2020 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Don Komarechka. You can learn more about the DMCA here:
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Image: City Walk in Fall
August 17, 2020
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Grandview 17th August 1920
August 17, 2020
Province 19200817, p.20
I have included this item as a cautionary tale for those using newspapers for historical research — they are not always accurate. “Mrs Slavin’s nursing home” was actually at 910 Victoria Drive not 910 Commercial Drive.
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Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 