EJ5K

This is the planned course for our soon to be famous EJ5K. Stay Tuned...

This route starts from the Riley Park community center located on the bike route at Ontario and 30th avenue. Nat Bailey Stadium is across the road and a new 50M swimming pool is currently under construction! The facilities for the Olympic curling event are also located nearby. I've marked this course online, on my bicycle and through GPS. It's accurate and difficult.

Begin by heading North along Ontario from Riley Park, make the 1st left turn on 29th and continue towards Cambie street. into QE Park at the main park entrance. Continue through the park making a gradual right turn the whole way through. Exit onto Ontario and continue East back to Riley Park Community Center.

There are showers at the finish in the community center and there are many delicious post run places to grab a coffee on Main Street. EJ One is located 1 mile south on Cambie street and Lulu Oakridge is a short jog to the North.

High Zoom.

unmarkedelectrics

unmarked electrics is music from my friends Jonathan (st.just vigilantes) and Corbin (sgt.benson). Sometimes it's really good. Find out more by clicking the title.

jeff wall

the destroyed room

Delacroix

the death of sardanapalus

martin creed

work # 660, 2007
35mm, 1:185, colour, sound, 5 minutes

shopping

learning to live without repetition

Ian Wallace

Ian Wallace at Catriona Jeffries last night. There were some excellent fixed gear bicycles parked outside and the bartender saved me the last pale ale. Good night!

The List

Conceived as a reaction to "The List" by Yes Studio. We mined our itunes list, omitting any bands with the prefix "The". This list is not a limited and signed edition and it is not for sale.

The List

Conceived as a reaction to the glut of new bands called ‘The... ’, we created a list of 99 classic band names prefixed with ‘The’. A limited, signed edition, printed in one color on 55gsm newsprint. Now sold out.

by the throat

new album from Ben Frost

this

Beautiful Bianchi Pista and custom bicycle with double top tube, double down tube, painted lugs and classic Brooks leather riveted saddle and leather handlebar tape outside of stumptown coffee in Portland. Great artwork inside too.

theory of machines

Caviar Club

lipstick traces

make friends with wolves

god help the girl

bibio

East Side Garage

Boss Dr 880

tri repetae

brooks saddles

Roland Sp 555

The new sheriff.

animal collective

horses

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England , and English expatriates built the US railroads. Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used. Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing. Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England , because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts. So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since. And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/ process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horse's asses.)

Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass.

Stephan Sagmeister

true alpinism does not require a mountain

-Federico Bahamontes, 1959.

may 1968

shopping

arabella campbell

the republic is dead

corkscrew

This famous corkscrew was designed by the same man who invented gearing for bicycles and quick release mechanism for bicycle wheels. Tuilio Campagnolo.

chris gergley

steven shearer

what I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect

morandi

I used to think that the magazine Modern Painters was both interesting and worth my time. I'm pretty sure that I'm less pretentious than my younger self although the proliferation of posts about italian bikes, famous chess gambits, glitch and Damien Hirst may suggest otherwise. My time seems to be more precious now too. The 1997 summer issue of Modern Painters contained the most eloquently written article about an artist that until then, I'd never heard of. That artist was Georgio Morandi. The author was Siri Hustveldt. Modern Painters has never been the same. Neither have I.

petrosian vs. spassky October 28, 1966

A wonderful game with a double exchange sacrifice, plus a Queen sac delivering the coup de grâce. The strategical basis for all of this is the great strength the White Bishop has in e6 as it is working in tandem with the White Queen on the diagonals attacking the Black King, and Black's misplaced Knight on the side of the board. Great game by Petrosian.

bicycle. beautiful. bicycle.

1. The Rider by Tim Krabbé

Krabbé is probably best known in this country as the author of the novel adapted as the film The Vanishing, but in his native Netherlands The Rider is his bestselling book. As a young man, Krabbé's forte was chess - in his late teens, he was inside the top 20 players in Holland - and he only discovered a talent for cycle-racing relatively late in life, in his 30s. That new-found passion eventually found its way into this autobiographical novella about a bike race in south-west France, but the chess knowledge still figures as Krabbé narrates the intricate battle of tactics and psychology as the race plays itself out against the bleak landscape of les causses. Like much of Krabbé's oeuvre, The Rider has a strange, dark, philosophical flavour: it is both a paean to pain and a hymn to the fellowship of the road. Nothing better is ever likely to be written on the subjective experience of cycle-racing.

autechre + de rosa

Neo Primato + Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae

arachadic acid methyl ester

how to destroy angels

beautiful inside my head forever

the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living

swimming 3000M

SLVR

Glasvegas

My friends  sort out the House Music and I take care of the Rock n' Roll Man!  It's an informal but good arrangement. The trouble is, I'm horrible at organizing anything.  Thanks to Kevin and Euan who organized a few tickets and Danielle who came through at the last minute with a few more.  I did eventually get tickets for all of us but I had to run back and forth between my pint at The Morrissey and Richards on Richards a few times.  I was really keen on seeing Glasvegas.  I have a theory that there is only one proper time to see a band.  It's important to see a band immediately after the release of their debut album while on their first big tour.  After the second album bands are bloated and lazy, technically proficient but creatively bankrupt.  The only exception to this is Primal Scream after their 3rd album, Screamadelica.  This, I judged, was the proper time.  Glasvegas were not the special gig that I expected but I had a good night.  If you like your Motown with a dose of feedback, check them out next time they're in town, when they're useless. 

vancouver secrets

There's certain "secret" things about Vancouver that I consider quite important.  If ever you've washed your hands and you absolutely, positively need to dry them, you could do a lot worse than the hand dryer at the Morrissey Pub on Granville Street, downstairs in the Ramada Hotel.  This is the best hand dryer in the city.  The pints and the music are good too.