blinkit

"Give way to the right"

1. Driving in Ireland is easier for North Americans than it seems. "Take 'er easy, give way to the right," advised my taxi driver (London born, returned to the country of his parents) on the way to the rental office. It was good advice. Driving UK-style is like a mirror world: the steering wheel is on the right, the rear view mirror on the left, turn signals on the right, faster traffic on the freeways takes the right lane. Signs are great on the freeways, eccentric everywhere else. Roundabouts are frequent (sometimes you'll get three or four in the space of a mile) and confusing at first but the advice about yielding to the right at roundabouts is invaluable. Less than five minutes after renting my car, I was on the road. It was easy (Dubliners complain about their traffic problem, but it's country driving compared to Vancouver's roadway combat zone), but I also had no idea where I was going, which was interesting. But I finally figured it out, using a map and after taking a long scenic tour south when I should have been going west. It also rained. A lot.

2. Irish men are short.

3. In Ireland, taxi drivers speak English. Unlike in Vancouver.

4. Irish people are easily pleased: "Thanks a million!" said the woman at the highway toll booth. "Thanks a million!" said the cashier at the gas station when I paid for a drink and croissant. "That's grand!" said the woman at the ticket counter at the Guinness Storehouse. Things here are described as being either "fantastic!" or "brilliant!" The ultimate compliment: "That's brilliant! Thanks a million!"

5. Irish dancing is goofy. The dancers look like they're paralyzed by stage fright from the hips up. But it's also athletically and rhythmically impressive, especially when they stop the damn fiddle (one jig and reel sounds much like every other jig or reel) and go right to the tribal drums and feet. Makes you want to paint yourself blue and charge a Norman column.

6. Accents in the west sound like the speaker is comatose or really, really relaxed. And I understand people here even less than in Dublin. "Oh, yes, it's beautiful here mmm hhh mmmm hhhh my mates hhh mmm hhhh had a pint mmm hhhh mmm blue water hhhh mmmm hhhh trees mmm hhhh mmm zzzzzz."

7. Everyone in Ireland has a mobile phone. Everyone texts, constantly. Everyone also has their own website. Free wifi in the cities is easy to find. They're more wired than we are.

24 Watch: Deja vu

24 Watch: Once again, the focus is off Jack and on the warmongering vice-president and on the internal politics of CTU. Once again, as in past seasons, a desk agent is arrested and subjected to interrogation. Once again, as in past seasons, the vice-president wants to nuke a Middle Eastern country. Once again, as in past seasons, the show's writers never bother to name that Middle Eastern country, leading to hilariously awkward dialogue, thus: "Hey, Mr. President, the ambassador from THAT country is here." "THAT country, the one harbouring the terrorists?" "Yes, THAT country." "Good. Show the ambassador from THAT country into my office." Despite getting less screen time once again, an injured Jack, who also receives some very bad personal news, manages to take down two baddies AND stop San Francisco from getting nuked. The bodycount goes up two, but the rescue count is more difficult. Considering it's a tactical nuke in an urban centre, I'll be arbitrary and say 250,000 lives saved directly and indirectly.

Today's bLINKit: Dvorak says the Wii is the significant development in gaming in years. He also says the music industry should use unregulated piracy to edge out the much more dangerous organized music pirates overseas.

And more troubles for poor TransLink: lots of problems with poor bus maintenance. It goes a long way to explaining why my bus last week broke down half way through the trip. (That after 30 minutes of buses went by my stop because they were full. When I finally got a bus, it broke down. When I finally got a bus after that, it was blocked all the way down the latter part of Granville by a wide load trailer edging into the express lane. It was not a stellar day for public transportation.)

Column catchup: Little laughs on the prairie

Today's bLINKit: My response from last week to Little Mosque on the Prairie, a charmingly loopy premise with a lopsided execution. I haven't seen any episodes since the first, so I hope it's gotten better, if only to justify the massive international buzz over its debut.

And the Courier story on the storm that knocked over thousands of trees in Stanley Park: in 1962.

And oh joy.

WMD: This month I mark more than a year of taking the bus to work. Despite a rocky start with drunks and juvies early last year, its settled in nicely in the stretch. Overcrowded buses still leave me behind at stops, the system essentially collapses with any kind of snow, and one express bus driver in particular seems to believe stopping at the stop nearest my home is dependent on his whim and mood, but it's largely OK, if only because I can devote most of the spring and summer to taking my bike. I'm better now at calculating when buses might be less full and trying to get those (I even snag the rare prized seat), and I probably share bus space with some of the politest transit riders around, a possible benefit of taking buses that begin in super polite Richmond. But the universe seems to have known my one-year transit anniversary was at hand, because in the past two weeks I've shared successive rides with two guys talking to themselves, and I don't mean on cellphones, although it's always been hard to tell the difference between the two types of conversations if the person is out of your line of sight. The first fellow last week had a Tourettic devotion to the F word, while the one today was chatting with "someone" about disabilities and people who think they're superior because they're physically perfect. At least the latter conversation made some sense. What's interesting is that other bus riders have a robust, civic tolerance of passengers with these kinds of mental health issues, as long as they're harmless, which usually seems to be the case. The most common response: a worried stare, a dawning realization, a shrug, followed by turning up the volume on the iPod.

Bavaria, beer and belief, part four: Getting around

WMD: Seeing how Germans get from point A to point B makes me want to cry. Efficient highways, small towns with modern electric trams, buses, downtown cores closed off for pedestrian use only, dedicated bike routes. Why, people wonder, can't we do the same? (One of the reasons we don't is because many of our cities, including Vancouver, grew up with the car and were designed to work with cars. And for awhile, it actually worked, until one day there were too many cars for the available roadspace. Meantime, we let out public transportation systems decline. Or in the case of Vancouver, we invested in hugely expensive rapid transit lines that arguably emptied the bank when it came to paying for other more accessible forms of public transit, such as buses, that have a farther reach.)

I don't know enough about the transit situation in Germany, which I assume has its own problems, except to say that the autobahn is fun; Germany is a great place to be on a bike; lots of people walk.

First the autobahn. Contrary to popular belief, it does have speed controls. While some of the time speed is unlimited -- and it's very interesting to be in a Volkswagen van going 150 k/mh and to be passed by BMWs and Porsches that sweep past you as if your vehicle was parked -- speed controls are enforced during certain traffic and weather conditions, at certain times of the day and when the highway passes a town. The latter limitation is apparently meant to cut down on traffic noise, not a concern that a cow or something will be run over. The speed limits are enforced by radar traps which apparently are a huge moneymaker for the government. The rules of the autobahn, which ran from two to three lanes on the sections we travelled on, are simple: if you want to go fast, stay in the left lane. If you want to go slow, stay out of the way and stick to the right hand lanes. It seems to work, and I was told German drivers are relatively disciplined. But I suspect that when crashes do occur, with cars hitting speeds in excess of 200 k/mh, nastiness must result. What does not kill us ...

And Germans clearly love cars as much as North Americans do. They're generally smaller: I saw very few SUVs and the police cars look like toys compared to the cruisers our cops drive. In Munich, headquarters to BMW, 18 per cent of all the cars on the road are made by that company. And traffic jams do happen. The first morning after we landed we hit backed up traffic from Munich airport on our way to Augsburg, which creates a bit of an irony: idling along at 5 k/mh on a highway of unlimited speed. Maybe there's a metaphor there for the apparently sluggish state of German politics compared to the potential the country possesses.

Bikes are common in the cities. You see people riding them all the time. In the countryside, bike routes physically separated from the highways and roads run throughout the country, making Germany a good cycling tour destination. In the cities, bikes often have their own lanes, either sharing roadspace or part of the wide sidewalks, and at intersections often have their own traffic lights. Cyclists get very annoyed at pedestrians who wander over the painted line into their space. And in contrast to Vancouver, where helmets must be worn by law and many cyclists wear dedicated bike clothing, the cyclists I saw looked like they'd just stepped out of the office or home. In Vancouver, preparing to ride your bike is like getting ready for battle. In Germany, it seems, it's just cycling.

Finally, there's the attention paid to pedestrians. They matter. Even in small towns like Landshut (pop. 60,000), whole blocks of the downtown core are closed off to all but pedestrians, buses and bikes. Munich was huge areas restricted to pedestrians, creating large areas where people walk, gather, meet in outdoor cafes, hold demonstrations and shop at the markets and stores that don't seem to suffer for the lack of car traffic. Walking around the downtown core is easy. You can do a circumference of the old city within an hour if you keep going. And if you're unable to walk far, tired or lazy, there is the underground U-bahn and the above ground trains. During public events, such as music festivals, the price of your ticket to the event often includes free use of the transit system. Let's see TransLink do that.

The photos:

Top: Looking out from a VW van to traffic controls on the autobahn. Heck if I know what those symbols mean.

Second from top: Pedestrian scene in the huge plaza in front of Munich city hall. Note the lack of vehicles.

Third from top: Vehicles of choice in Munich: a Smart car (although apparently the Smart car company is having financial trouble); another smaller car which may have been a Fiat; and a BMW, whose cars account for 18 per cent of the traffic in the city.

Fourth from top: Tourists on a cycle tour in a pedestrian area of Munich, not far from a tourist-oriented beer hall.

Bottom: an electric tram in Augsburg.

Today's bLINKit: Rocketboom, a hugely popular daily news site with a cheeky edge and a very cute anchor. It costs them a few bucks a day to do this short broadcast, and yet the people behind it rake in something like $80,000 a week.

Firm foothold

WMD: At left are sandals, but not just any sandals: they're "sports sandals." They arrived in the mail courtesy of my brother, sister in law and two nieces as an early birthday present. I've never been one to wear sandals, and I loathe the sound of flipflops in summer time, but these will be great around the house. Thanks, guys.

On the buses: Recent rides have been pleasant and free of drunks and monologists. Yesterday, a young guy across the way from me spilled a bit of his bubble tea on the floor. Bless him, he pulled a towel from his carry bag and wiped it up. Bless his parents for teaching him responsibility. But a warning: take the bus on a major route past certain private schools at shortly past 3 p.m., and suddenly your bus will be invaded by three or four dozen teenage girls wearing sweaters and tartan dresses. I know some people might not think that's a problem ...

TV farewell: Da Vinci aired its final episode Monday night, and it was a slam bang hour that travelled at far above highway speeds. Cops got framed, the high and mighty got arrested, coverups were exposed and then covered up again, politicians resigned. But what's this? Da Vinci battled bad press coverage from one of the city newspapers by banning their boxes on city streets. And no one around him batted an eye at it.

Today's bLINKit: A Slate story on The Movies.

More bus riding tales

WMD: Last week, due to certain circumstances, I drove four days out of five to work instead of taking the bus. It was an interesting experiment. Getting to work along Granville from south to north in the morning was no sweat. But twice, for inexplicable reasons, Granville going south was a parking lot. A drive that should take 15 minutes took an hour. The second time it happened, I diverted to Oak Street, only to hit another parking lot. But it wasn't nearly as bad: only 15 minutes more.

What it showed me is that commuters in this city are screwed, no matter what mode of transportation you take. I like and support the bus, but in principle. In practice, it continues to suck. Waiting for the bus during rush hour is a bit like being in a Left Behind flick -- everyone gets raptured away and your left at the stop with the other unsaved masses. What is the purpose of a public transportation system in a supposed world class city if you can wait at a stop for 35 minutes, during rush hour, as bus after bus roars by packed to capacity. And if you do get on, you're crammed together like sardines. The idea of public transit is that it's supposed to be public and efficient and move people in a relatively environmentally friendly way without making them feel like cattle. Our transit system is, at so many times, an incentive to go back to cars. Or bikes, which is what I'll do when the days get longer.

On the first day I drove last week, by the end of the work day, which was typically busy and chaotic, I'd forgotten that I had driven my car in the morning. In my defence, I've rarely driven to work in the past five years. I'm also a creature of habit and have taken the bus for two months now. So I did what I do at the end of each work day, got on a bus. And of course, as soon as I got on, a drunk got on with me.

And of course he sat in my section. Claiming to be from the Northwest Territories, he loudly declaimed on the imperialism of Christianity, how Columbus was a genocidal maniac, how his followers were pedophiles, why they should have died on Baffin Island (or something like that) and why the Asian passengers on the bus, who account for maybe 75 per cent of the demographic on my route, should go back to China on their "banana boats." And as always, when someone is acting like a goon/loon, everyone pointedly ignored him, which is what happened today. I got on the bus, found it was only half full, got a rare seat, and as soon as I got on, two juvies and their skank girlfriends sneaked in through the back doors and started rolling joints. Much use of the F word. It's enough to make me want to take conflict resolution seminars to deal with these jerks. Or perhaps mace.

WMD2: The Caspercam is offline for retooling. I've migrated to WinXP and need updated software. Hopefully I'll have something by the weekend.

Today's bLINKit: They're young, hip, literate and they seem to know a lot more than I do about what's going on in this city that's at all interesting. You can find them at Beyond Robson.

On the buses: lucky numbers and cellphone users

WMD: My new digs are no longer within walking distance of my office, which means I take a bus to and from work. It's a fast express bus, so the trip is fairly speedy (15 to 20 minutes), but I'd forgotten what it's like to share your commute with other people, especially drunk or criminal ones.

Heard Wednesday: on my way home, a drunk but well dressed passenger, carrying a bottle in his bag, kept asking people around him a) when the bus was going to reach Richmond; b) "what's your lucky number? C'mon, choose a number! You've got to have one!" The guy beside him kept choosing zero, which drove the drunk nuts.

Heard Today: a guy on his cellphone doing drug deals or some kind of drug exchange. $150 an oz, he said to whoever was on the other end. He added, "Don't f--- with me."