Archive: Posts about Victoria
October 21st, 2009, 1 Comment »
For no reason in particular, lately I’ve been mentioning lost animal posters. The other day I saw a poster for a lost chinchilla named Finn. Is the name important? Do chinchillas come when they’re called?
In any case, I’d assumed that poor Finn was probably caught and consumed by a dog, coyote or particularly large cat. However, it turns out that he survived:
I appreciate that the owner went around and actually marked up all the posters with the good news. I always wonder what the success rate is on lost pets. It’s a little weird that the owner wrote the follow-up note in the first person, isn’t it? But, then, I gather chinchillas are excellent jumpers.
By the way, this is the best photo I’ve seen in Wikipedia for a while.
1 Comment »
June 27th, 2009, 4 Comments »
I assume that, given all of the lost cat posters in my neighbourhood, one of my neighbours is a werewolf. You may recall this carefully-worded poster featuring Mr. Softie. He was “heavier set”.
Yesterday I spotted a yet another new missing cat poster. Mylo (troubling spelling there) apparently a “has a ‘belly’”:
It’s charming the way the owners choose to describe their pets’ girth. Why is ‘belly’ in quotation marks, anyway?
4 Comments »
May 25th, 2009, 2 Comments »
There were several of these handmade signs posted on telephone poles down the street from our house:
I assume it’s either some inside joke, or somebody’s a little off their rocker. In case you’re wondering, ‘thorobaaads’ is a Google whack.
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May 5th, 2009, 4 Comments »
Last Sunday, James, Monique, Julie and I visited Sooke Potholes. It’s a regional park (there’s also a provincial park–I need to work out their relationship, geographic and otherwise) along the picturesque Sooke River, which drains into Sooke Basin just east of the little town of the same name.
The park gets its name from the potholes which dot the river’s length:
Glacial action during the last ice age 15,000 years ago is responsible for the formations, as the moving, melting ice packs stripped the surface area and carved a path deep into the natural bedrock. Huge boulders carried along by the rushing river became lodged, were swirled against the canyon walls and consequently carved out the potholes that can be seen today.
It’s an extremely popular park for swimming, as well as the moderately-dangerous activity of cliff diving. Some young person occasionally kills themselves when they misjudge a jump into one of the many pools.
The park has one other unusual feature–a kind of modern ruin. It’s the remains of a lodge that Albert Yuen started developing after buying the land in 1981:
The heavily timbered lodge, the first step of Yuen’s resort, still sits unfinished overlooking the Sooke River, just beyond Sooke Potholes Provincial Park. The 20-year-old structure will likely be removed because it’s in bad shape, Turner said.
Here are a couple of photos of the remains:
Whenever I see this site, I’m struck by how it looks, on a superficial level, much like the ruins of a 500-year-old keep.
Photos by James and Harold.
4 Comments »
April 20th, 2009, 13 Comments »
We live in Victoria, but spend a lot of time in Vancouver. For the first couple of months of this year, when teaching a course at UBC, we were over every week. I actually don’t mind the ferry ride itself. I enjoy the opportunity to get an hour of work done without the distraction of the internet.
It’s the bus trips between Victoria and Sidney and Tsawassen and Vancouver that suck hard. They’re long, tedious and you can’t really work. Plus, I’m inevitably sitting near some cell-phone-talking douchebag who wants the whole bus to know about their new Ugg boots, or whatever.
I heard about a possible new passenger ferry service between downtown Vancouver and Victoria (here’s a short piece from Global, after the ad, thanks to 8chocolate for the link). Nautisol is still in the market research stage, and we’ll probably be living elsewhere if and when they put boats in the water, but I was still intrigued. From their website:
- 90 minute travel between city centers Victoria-Vancouver
- Economy or Business Class
- E-Ticketing with multi-language function
- Kiosk ticket vending with multi-language function
- Telephone ticketing
- Terminal locations integrated with existing public and private transportation systems
- Full service terminals to include Wi-Fi, ATM and Food Kiosks
- Bicycle racks
- Shuttle Bus Services
I see somebody caught the capitalization plague.
They’re running a rather peculiar customer survey, full of push questions (”Liquid Natural Gas is the fuel used to power this ferry service. LNG is one of the safest and cleanest fuels available.”), but I’m intrigued. Two attempts at providing alternative services have failed in the past. There’s the infamous PacificCats, rusting away in North Vancouver shipyards. Before that there was the Royal Sealink Express, which I remember taking a few times as a student in the early nineties. It’s a pity that didn’t work out–it was very convenient. The last time I was in the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront station, I’m pretty sure I saw a fading Sealink brand on an office door.
I’d imagine that, at some point, there will be enough people wanting to shuttle more efficiently between Vancouver and Victoria to make such a service viable. Has that day come?
13 Comments »
April 5th, 2009, 3 Comments »
I snapped this photo of a poster in downtown Victoria. Her head doesn’t look quite right, does it?
Looks like a Photoshop Disaster, if you ask me.
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April 3rd, 2009, 4 Comments »
It’s never fun when somebody loses their pet, but I was struck by the careful wording on this sign that I spotted in Victoria. He’s not big or fat, he’s heavier set:
4 Comments »
March 30th, 2009, 5 Comments »
Over the past year or so, we’ve been running a lot of one-day training sessions on all this social media marketing stuff. Combine that with the fact that our social media marketing course at UBC was full and had a sizable wait list, and we’re seeing a lot of demand for this kind of training. Seeing as we already have the curriculum prepared, we thought we’d run a couple of day-long workshops in Victoria and Vancouver. Here’s the blurb:
Adding social media into the marketing mix is increasingly important for marketers who want to establish an online presence for their businesses. We're running one-day workshops to teach communicators and marketers, as well as small business owners, how to:
- Bring more visitors to your website
- Increase your company’s visibility online
- Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
- Get your website social media ready
- Craft a potent social media pitch
- Incorporate online channels like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter into your marketing programs
- Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas
Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don'ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.
Students will leave with:
- A copy of our social media marketing ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook
- Templates for creating a social media marketing plan
- Templates for creating an influencer database
All of the details are on the website, but there will be sessions in Victoria on April 30 and Vancouver on May 28.
Attend on the Cheap(er)
The workshop is $299, all in after taxes and fees. There’s a way you can get a discount, though, and another way that you can attend for free:
- You can save $50 off that price by blogging about the workshop on your own established (meaning not brand new) site. Don’t have a blog? Ask a friend or a local blogger if you can write a guest post for their site.
- We’re giving away one seat for free for each event. All you have to do is tweet a link to the page on Capulet’s site (here’s a shortened one: http://capulet.com/smm) and include the hash tag #smmvic or #smmvan, depending on the session you want to attend. So, a sample tweet might look like:
OMG, I really want to attend this event: http://capulet.com/smm. It looks awesomesauce! #smmvan
Or, you know, something along those lines. We’ll randomly choose a winner for each event about two weeks before they occur.
5 Comments »
January 19th, 2009, 3 Comments »
Last Saturday night we saw alternative country singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards at the Alix Goolden Hall (needs a Wikipedia page) here in Victoria. It was an all-around excellent concert experience. Edwards is a great songwriter blessed with a distinctive voice. I read one critic recently who described her as a “persuasive live performer”. That’s very apt–she demands that you listen to her.
She has three albums of really strong material, and any fan would have gone home happy with her well-chosen set list. In fact, the only song that I could name (without consulting my MP3 collection) that she didn’t play was “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like”. For the encore, she played a delightful version of “Mercury”, and then she and her husband-bandmate stepped in front of the mics to play a lovely, quiet version of the Everly Brothers “When Will I Be Loved”. Finally, they finished with a terrific, tumbling cover of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”. It’s a confident singer who ends her show with two covers.
It was, all in all, an excellent concert going experience, enriched by my first visit to the Alix Goolden Hall. It’s a converted 800-seat, 19th century church, and now belongs to the Victoria Conservatory of Music. I tried to determine what denomination the church had been, but couldn’t find anything on the web. It’s quite an austere space, with white walls, a sloped, curving balcony and ornate stained glass windows, so we guessed Greek Orthodox. It also had lovely acoustics–aside from the Chan Centre, probably the best my in-expert ears have heard on the West Coast.
You can read more about the space and see a panorama (MOV file) if you’re interested. Those links go to some web company’s staging site, so I’m not sure how long they’ll last.
Edwards’ opening act made me feel old. It was Dustin Bentall. Yes, that’s Barney Bentall’s son. Barney Bentall, for the unintroduced, was kind of a regionally-famous singer in the eighties and nineties. He played with a band called “The Legendary Hearts”, and they had hits like “Something To Live For”.
Photo by John Benson.
3 Comments »
November 20th, 2008, 8 Comments »
The Belfry Theatre is, in my view, the best producer of mainstream theatre in the province. They’re more consistent than The Arts Club or The Vancouver Playhouse, and yet they take more risks with the play choices.
Yesterday I got a media release from the Belfry, summarizing their AGM and reporting on their last year’s work. It reminded me that they’re also currently one of the most financially stable and successful theatres that I know of.
They have an huge subscriber base of 6700 people for a theatre that only seats 277. Their average attendance for their mainstage shows last season was a mind-boggling 92%. They recently extended their production runs from four to five weeks when many Canadian theatres are reducing theirs to three.
I’ve always been an keen observer of arts funding and economics, and so was interested to see where the Belfry got its money from. And, as regular readers know, I love a chart. I produced a couple. The first shows where the Belfry’s revenue comes from:
The second shows the blue chunk of the big pie–private fundraising:
I asked Mark Dusseault at the Belfry about why ‘gaming money’, funding from BC Lottery Corporation, is under ‘private fundraising’. He explained that there were various reasons: government accounting practice, no peer review process and the way the money used to be doled out.
When gaming was originally set up we (staff and volunteers from the theatre) had to go and work the events. We spent a couple of days a year either at a bingo parlour or casino. We were, in essence, fundraising. We had to apply to participate and there was no guarantee as to how much money we would make (or lose).
I actually remember doing this once at a casino for some Vancouver theatre company.
The green slice is public money from sundry agencies: Canada Council for the Arts, CRD Arts Development and BC Cultural Services are the biggest contributors. Their entire budget is about $2.3 this year.
Where Does the Money Go?
I suppose the other question is how is that money spent?
I don’t have any great insights into these numbers. I just wanted to explore them a little, and make pretty charts. Do you have any insights?
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