The Bubars Coming West

Though I’m originally from Ontario, my family traces its roots back to British Columbia quite deeply. The fact that I was born in Toronto has as much to do with the Royal Canadian Air Force as it does with anything else: both Grandparents were enlisted, and moved frequently as a result.

Midway, BC is a town with a population of about 700 now. Like most small towns in British Columbia it’s dying—quite literally in this case, with an aging population and almost no jobs in town to attract new ones. It’s a charming place in the way that small towns can be, and a desolate place in the way they can also be. When I haven’t been in a while I miss it; when I’m there, I can’t wait to get back to Vancouver.

My family were early settlers in Midway, and farmed in the area for over 100 years. I have a branding iron from that farm in my one bedroom apartment: the kind of ironic accessory any hipster would love to have, but in my case it’s not ironic.

My family is a part of the history and culture in that part of the world, a history and culture that will slowly die as generations pass. We live in an increasingly urban society and young people from Midway and places like it gravitate towards Kelowna, Cranbrook, Golden and their ilk these days. Even these places seem small compared to Vancouver, but they’re the urban meccas of their regions. It’s a shame in some ways that this is happening, but it’s a natural evolution of a society that’s no longer tied to the idea of living off the land as it once was.

There was a time when people gravitated towards places like Midway, and this is the story of travelling from New Brunswick to Midway by horse, and how my family came to be out west. It’s worth reading.

The Bubars Coming West

Taken from the Boundary Historical Society Seventh Report 1976, pp. 46 - 51
By Beatrice (Bubar) Weed and Wesley Weed

The following story was found among the papers of Mr. J.M. Bubar. It was scribbled in pencil on the front and back covers of a B.C. Telephone Co. report (for the year ended 31 December, 1936). Although sketchy in places it does give us an idea of how difficult it was to reach the Boundary country in the early days.

The Bubars seem to have been always pioneers. They came from Massachusetts to the St. John River in Canada in 1765. Holding land first at St. Anne’s (now Fredericton), they sold that and moved up river to above Hanland. Increasing, they spread out, some back to the States, others West and ever West.

Came the date about 1878 when one, a married man, headed for the Red River country. Riel has been squashed and the west new and it was easy money for a worker. One year later back came the call “come”. Some trip for a young woman and three children. The train carried them down in to Maine, back in to Canada, over to Detroit, on to St. Paul, up North again in to Canada by stage and boat and at last in to Winnipeg. Sounds simple now but there were only poor cars, no connections, nothing but more or less, guess work with no conveniences.

Continue reading "The Bubars Coming West"

A Long Walk in the Sun

A phone call comes in with sad news for a friend on a sunny day in Vancouver and really the only option is to have a coffee on the beach then take a long slow walk together around English Bay through Stanley Park across the Lions Gate Bridge and finally home to West Vancouver. When Vancouver’s weather cooperates, there’s really not a lot of other places I’d like to be.

When a Typo’s not a Typo

A couple of days ago I wrote this bit about a typo on Granville Magazine’s site. I got a message from Granville Mag on Twitter and looked into it a bit more and it turns out it wasn’t a typo after all: sort of.

Firstly, congratulations to Granville Magazine for working social media effectively and well. Apparently my post was flagged in a Google Alert and they got in touch. That’s the kind of responsiveness you should have if you’re doing business online. Well done.

As it turns out Granville Magazine’s content management system has an RSS feed generator that takes its input from the URL. This means you can link to http://www.granvilleonline.ca/rss/yippee-ki-yay-mother-chucker and the last part—in this case yippee-ki-yay-mother-chucker shows up on the page. I mistook this for a typo, when in fact it was a bad link posted by a twitter user.

So another lesson learned about the impact of this type of URL fed search. It’s definitely not a problem—it can be a very effective way of doing things—but it can sometimes cause things that look like mistakes at first glance.

An Aperture Workflow that Works for Me

A while ago, even before I finally made the jump to a Canon 5d Mark II camera, I bought Apple’s Aperture. I had iPhoto, of course, and while I think that application is a fine choice for managing family snapshots I felt like I needed more.

Aperture is a big program, with a lot to learn. This includes not only the tools to process your images but also the tools it provides to manage your images. There are quite a few books, tutorials and guides to the various functions of the program and they’re worth reading. You can probably find the answer to a lot of technical questions on Apple’s support site, which has an entire section dedicated to Aperture.

What I couldn’t find, however, was a general answer what I thought was a simple question: How should I use Aperture? One of the great advantages of shooting digitally—especially in low light situations as I often to—is the ability to shoot a lot of photos. Of course that means when you get home you need to deal with a lot of photos, and that’s where the tricky part starts.

Given that, I thought I’d share a workflow that works for me. It may not work for anybody who reads this, but you never know. I’d suggest only considering it as a starting point. You’ll develop your own over time and it may serve your purposes better. Feel free to pass along any suggestions.

Continue reading "An Aperture Workflow that Works for Me"

William Shatner: Rocketman

The man, he is a genius. Truly.

A Good Prominent Typo is Always Fun

A good typo hits everyone every once in a while, especially in the modern day and age when lax editorial standards seem to be the new norm. I once recall an errant t appearing on the end of the word far in an article I wrote for Beyond Robson. It was as much my fault as it was the editor’s, of course, though I never felt that much got edited at the time. I lament the days of working with a good editor.

This one’s at Granville Magazine is fun though because it’s so prominent and in the header of Oink Magazine it would be completely appropriate. It’s part of a template, and probably appears on quite a few pages. I’m curious how long its been there.

Portraits of Heroes

More Star Wars Lego means more portraits of heroes.

Nadia von Hahn: Winter is Nearly Over

Vancouver’s beautifully voiced and wonderfully talented Nadia von Hahh has a new video out. Photos from her recent CD release party are on my Flickr photostream.

Why I Stopped Reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

Far be it from me to suggest that one of the best selling books in the world isn’t good. Clearly, popularity is a judge of quality: that’s why Oprah does so well. Nonetheless, this is the paragraph that made me drop The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in favour of The Hotel New Hampshire in less time than it takes to make a cup of tea.

“Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative; the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in aluminum case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960MB RAM and a 60GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.

Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 × 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.”

A lot of people have told me the plot was well written and suspenseful. I’d seen the movie, so the plot wasn’t really gripping me. This wasn’t the only example of needless detail in the book, but it was the most egregious in the first 300 page.

The fact that you can’t get a computer with two memory slots to 960MB of RAM? That’s didn’t even bug me that much.

Ten Dire Straits Songs Better Than “Money for Nothing”

The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council recently ruled that Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing, which includes the use of the word faggot in a satirical sense, can no longer be played on Canadian radio unless the word is edited out.

The fact that the song was recorded in 1985 and has probably had less airplay in the last fifteen years than any number of misogynistic and profanity laden pieces of popular music released since appears to be lost on the Council. The decision could lead to subsequent bans on songs like The Pogues Fairtytale of New York no more television airings of various Austin Powers movies, all the while allowing Ice T to scream Copkiller, Britney Spears to implore someone to Hit Me Baby One More Time and Biz Mark E to sing about Sittin’ on a toilet / Waitin’ for my bowels to move. Well played, CBSC. Well played.

The fact that a regulatory body has the time to waste something like this while virtually every other similar institution does nothing is astonishing. (Hello CRTC? Have you noticed that cell phone rates in Canada are amongst the highest in the world these days? Maybe you should get on that.)

The ridiculousness of the situation has generated tonnes of press coverage, all of which has seemed to gloss over a simple but critical fact: Money for Nothing is a horrible song. Dire Straits is a legendary band and Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing is astonishing to listen too (he was once described by Douglas Adams as having “…an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink.” but Money for Nothing is not his strongest work. It was a huge hit, and took the band’s popularity to new levels (particularly in North America) but there are at least ten songs that you should be listening to instead of it. Even Knopfler has said in the past that he’s not happy that the song has become the band’s best known legacy.

There are at least ten songs you should be listening too instead of Money for Nothing though, and here they are.

Telegraph Road

Epic and thirteen minutes in length when played live, Telegraph Road eschews the conventions of the rock and roll epic and remains beautiful throughout. The version on Alchemy: Live remains high on my playlist.

Continue reading "Ten Dire Straits Songs Better Than “Money for Nothing”"

The Right Look Should Suffice

For All Our Failings, We Humans Are Capable of Greatness

Perseid Meteor Shower 2010 from Crescent Beach

This is a 45 minute exposure of the sky above Crescent Beach south of Vancouver during the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower in August of 2010. You can view a much larger version of it as well or just visit Flickr directly.

The meteors themselves are the streaks that you can see moving in linear paths. There is one in the lower left and lower right that’s easily visible, as well as one that starts just slightly to the left of centre at the top of the frame. If you spot others, feel free to let me know.

Lea Nelson: 1917 - 2011

I have better photos of my Grandmother than this somewhere. Like so many of them, they’re tucked away as negatives in a binder and I haven’t scanned them. I like this photo though. It was probably from my first visit to Vancouver, though it may have been my second. My brother and I stayed with them and we visited the sites. I’m the one who gives people tours now.

In August of 2000 I came out to Vancouver for a vacation with my soon to be wife and to celebrate my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary. I hadn’t seen them in a very long time at that point: these are my father’s parents, and my relationship with them was strained by his departure. When I moved here I made it a point of visiting my Grandparents though. Once a month, at least, I’d drive down to White Rock to have lunch with them. It was nice.

When my wife told me she was leaving, White Rock was the first place I went. I remember standing on the steps of their house and being completely unable to speak for what seemed like forever. They were the first people I told.

My grandmother passed away a couple of days ago, gently in her sleep. For the last few years of her life she had been in Peace Arch Hospital after having had a heart attack at home that was quickly followed by several in the hospital. She never recovered and her mind started to go not long after. My Grandfather lived across the road and went to see her once a week, but it was hard for him: she’d ask him to stay, or wanted to go home with him and didn’t really understand what was going on. He told me once how hard it was for him. I think it was hard for him to tell me that.

She was a very proper lady—a fact which drove my Mother nuts sometimes. She was the only one of my Grandparents who wasn’t born in Canada too: my family is very Canadian, but Grandma Nelson was born in Europe and her family settled in Manitoba as farmers in the early 20th century.

The last few years haven’t been kind to her. I’m going to miss that very proper old lady.

Justin Townes Earle: Harlem River Blues on the David Letterman Show

Bree is there on the upright bass, but it’s just not the same with Josh on the fiddle. Fun nonetheless.

I Forgot The Sadies

A few days ago, I posted my list of the best concerts in Vancouver in 2010. The year is long and with a lot of shows seen I naturally forgot one, and the funny thing is it was probably the best all round show of the year.

The thing is, I didn’t have my camera with me. The show was actually before I bought my Canon 5d Mark II, and I didn’t pack my G11. Without a photographic record of it, the concert sort of slipped from my memory.

Often called the best live band in Canada, The Sadies stopped by Vancouver’s Legendary Biltmore Cabaret in early June. By the end of the almost four hours of music I’m surprised the place had a roof left on it.

To this day I find listening to The Sadies on album a bit uninspiring. It just doesn’t do that much for me. When these guys get on stage it’s like setting a fire. At a gas station. With a dynamite truck filling up at the time. I frankly thought they were never going to stop playing.

So, to Mike and Sean and Dallas and Travis, my sincere apologies for leaving you off the first list. It wasn’t intentional, and I’ll blame a memory which relies on a camera as often as not. I’ll be there next time right at the front of the stage.

Tag Cloud