By Bev Schellenberg McDonald’s is the official 2010 Winter Olympics fast food sponsor, as evidenced by their ubiquitous billboards and TV ads showing Canadian Olympians about to consume supposedly performance-enhancing food. But while games-goers may enjoy collecting the Olympic mascot toys and drinking from the official Olympic water bottle, their eating preferences are, literally, all […]
Olympics
Pairs skating: the CBC and the National Post
By Frank Moher Hmm. What is this doing on the website of our public broadcaster? Vancouver protestors fall silent. The article I have linked to on the CBC site is a product of its agreement with The National Post to jointly cover the Olympics. It appeared in the Post first, and from there was syndicated […]
More Olympics double-standards
By Alison@Creekside On Valentines Day, 2,000 to 4,000 people marched through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the annual Women’s March for Missing and Murdered Women. A memorial march — not a protest — it is organized and led by women of the DTES to remember the hundreds of aboriginal women who have gone missing or been […]
Olympics Anywhere
By Bev Schellenberg So you don’t have tickets for any of the 2010 Winter Olympics? Consider yourself lucky. Think of it: by not going to the Opening Ceremonies, you’ve now saved the $175-1,110 ticket cost, the aggravation of pushing through the protestors, the hassle of braving the Vancouver rain, and the monotony of waiting for […]
Pass the Olympic doobie, man
By Bev Schellenberg “The Olympic torch came from Hitler, you know.” I pressed my phone closer to my ear, thinking I’d heard incorrectly. “Pardon?” “Yeah. It was his idea. I think, anyway. You can look it up on internet.” I never thought I’d be impressed with an idea Hitler came up with, and I wasn’t […]
Olympic serendipity
By Bev Schellenberg As a mom of two children in elementary school in British Columbia during the Winter Olympics 2010, I braced myself for an onslaught of Olympic-twisted curricula and information — dare I say, propaganda — coming home prior to the grand spectacle. After all, the Olympics website includes a section for teachers complete […]
Ambivalent at the Olympics
By Bev Schellenberg The Vancouver Winter Olympics will open in six days, whether British Columbians like it or not. The other day I was sitting in a Burnaby chiropractor’s office across the waiting room from a white-haired lady when she suddenly blurted, “I don’t want the Olympics here. They never asked me.” I looked around, […]
Cultural games
By Alison@Creekside The City of Vancouver ordered the removal of this mural from the public artspace outside the Downtown Eastside’s The Crying Room gallery on the grounds it is “graffiti.” Artist Jesse Corcoran works at a homeless shelter: “The oppressive nature of the Games is what I wanted to capture and how the majority is […]
Any ideas to declare?
By Frank Moher We’ve now seen, for the second time in recent memory, a journalist being harassed by Canadian border guards while trying to enter the country. Three years ago, American talk-radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones was detained for four hours, in the middle of the night, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada agents in […]
Olympics: Celebrate or else
By Alison@Creekside An enthusiastic supporter of the Beijing Olympics who posted his photos online at Flickr under a creative commons licence – which allows anyone to use them for free with attribution – received a cease and desist letter from International Olympic Committee lawyers: “Images of the Games taken by you may not be used […]
