Carnegie Holding 30th Anniversary Celebrations

This week, Carnegie Centre is holding 30th anniversary celebrations all week.

The primary celebration will be this Wednesday. They're holding it on welfare cheque day, a day when the fewest possible poor people will show up.

The Olympics are Here and so is the Fear

This evening I went to the salad bar at Whole Foods at Cambie & Broadway, and afterwards went across the street to Wendy's restaurant for coffee. There were people in there with a range of accents, and a group of Quebecers speaking French, leading me to believe that some of these people were early arrivals for the Olympics.

A Chinese man who spoke perfect English, dressed all in black with a pager on his belt, walked up to the manager and told her that a "suspicious item" had been sitting on a table by the wall for some time with nobody around. He laughed nervously and said, "It could go boom!", throwing his hands in the air.

I knew a guy who lived in Israel who told me that suspicious packages left in public places there got noticed and reported, but I'd never seen this happen in Canada.

I looked over at the item on the table. It did look suspicious. There was nothing else on the table, no food or drink, just a flat black plastic box about the size of an old fashioned portable cassette tape recorders. The manager walked over and looked at it, but somebody called out that it was theirs.

Nobody treated the guy who reported it as though he was paranoid. The manager walked back past his table and said, "Thank you, sir."

We of course have Islam to thank for this fear.