Police Ticket Sidewalk Bicyclist

Finally, somebody gets a ticket for riding their bicycle on the sidewalk.

It happened this afternoon at around 3:30 when a bunch of Vancouver Police officers were standing in front of the Carnegie Center at Main and Hastings. A guy rode across the crosswalk on his bike and then west on Hastings St. on the sidewalk. A cop approached him, took out his ticket book and wrote down the guy's information. Then he handed him a ticket.

The bylaw probiting bicycling on the sidewalk needs to be enforced more often. Bicyclists are becoming an increasing menace on the sidewalk.

When I told a friend of mine this evening about police issuing the ticket, he told me what he had seen a bicyclist do on Main St. in Chinatown. A guy on a bike, wearing a blue helmet, rode fast toward a crowd of people waiting to board the bus. The people scurried out of the way.

"I saw the same thing! On Main Street in Chinatown!", I told him. "I just wrote about it today [in a draft of this post]. What did the guy look like?" He was middle aged, my friend told me.

The guy I saw didn't look more than 32 years old. It was a few months ago, about 5:30 a.m., and this guy, with his helmet on, was bicycling fast toward a cluster of people boarding a bus. They scattered like pigeons.

On three or four occasions, I have called out to bicyclists on Main St. not to ride on the sidewalk. One guy yelled in my face as he whizzed past me, "Fuck off!" I have resigned myself now to the fact that the bicyclists own the sidewalk. I just move over.

I am thinking along the same lines as a guy who was quoted in the "rant" section of the Westender newspaper advising pedestrians to get into the habit of walking along the curb so that bicyclists can have the sidewalk all to themselves.

It continues to amaze me that bicyclists put on their expensive gear so that they feel safe and confident riding their bikes . . . on the sidewalk. They think they're "green" but they're not; they're yellow cowards.

Jimmy Pattison has a Spot for Ethel Whitty

Sunday night is the busiest night of the week in the Carnegie Computer Room, as people prepare for the new week. So what did City staff do?

Believe it or not, they turned out the lights and locked the door.

After the door had been locked for a couple of hours, a volunteer opened it as a favor to people in a jam with no internet access. But he is not a regular volunteer in the computer room.

That's the problem at Carnegie with its multi-million dollar budget: the poor have to beg and cajole somebody into providing computer services that the Center is richly funded to provide.

Staff always have an excuse for not opening the doors. The current flavor of the week is that staff person Colleen Gorrie is off sick. They're like children; they must be watched constantly. The only excuse they haven't yet used is that the dog ate their homework.

Did I mention that the Sunday evening before last, the poor were locked out of the computer room as well?

The Great Taxpayer Rip-off at Carnegie continues. It is not only CUPE members who are responsible but the City's manager at Carnegie, Ethel Whitty, and her City Hall boss Jacquie Forbes-Roberts.

If you are even suspected of tattletaling to the taxpayer about locked doors by discussing the issue on the internet, Forbes-Roberts will succumb to pressure from Carnegie staff to bar you from the building. Don't believe me? Ask William Simpson who was barred "indefinitely" in a letter signed by Forbes-Roberts and hand delivered to him by Ethel Whitty and CUPE member Dan Tetrault.

Billionaire Jimmy Pattison, who has an office about ten blocks west of Carnegie, should now have spots for the likes of CUPE, Whitty, and Forbes-Roberts. He just bought "Ripley's Believe It Or Not".

Squamish Nation Feast Disappears

Today there was a sign in the lobby of the Carnegie Community Center announcing that the Squamish Nation would be hosting a traditional native feast of salmon, bannock, and two types of soup at Oppenheimer Park at 2 p.m. on March 16.

Several people left Carnegie and walked over to the park, arriving at 2:20 p.m., but didn't find any sign of a traditional native feast.

I figured there had been a mistake. But a middle aged aboriginal man saw it differently: "Somebody must have pulled a prank," he said calmly. "to make the Squamish Nation look bad."

Christians were there though, giving out soup from there slightly corny white van (see top photo) with words painted in black across the side: "Jesus Loves You". When I see that van around the neighborhood, it reminds me of a woman from Nova Scotia interviewed on Coast to Coast radio about a near death experience in which a figure of light told her, "Don't ever think you're not loved."

Bus Kills Pedestrian at Main & Hastings

A "Top Class Limousine" tour bus was at the bottom of it's class tonight when it had a pedestrian under it's wheel. The 68 year old pedestrian was struck by the bus shortly before 9 p.m. as it turned north off Hastings onto Main St., by the Pathways Job Search Center. A witness who passed by shortly after the accident, said, "They had to take him out from under the wheel." (The pedestrian can be seen lying under a white sheet at the left of the photo above.)

The bus appeared empty of passengers.

At least one security guard came to help from the Carnegie Community Center across the street. The pedestrian still had a pulse but as a police officer entering the Carnegie Center said, "It doesn't look good." He died shortly afterwards at the scene. He did not die enroute to hospital as CTV television reported. He was put into a wine colored body bag at the scene and loaded into the coroner's van.

A bearded VPD Constable wearing a turban (on right of photo above) stood behind the yellow tape across the street from the accident to make sure nobody violated that boundry. But his skills as a community-friendly cop were less than stellar; he was defensive and snooty when a local resident politely asked him if he could walk on the Main Street sidewalk to get home. That same Constable was standing by the yellow tape at the Cambie Hotel on February 15th, the night Steve Seymour was shot to death.

Carnegie Locks Poor Out of Computer Room this Afternoon

This afternoon, the computer room at Carnegie Center was closed. Low income people arriving to use computers found the door locked and the place in darkness.

Carnegie's Director, Ethel Whitty, has an office just meters away. But she seems to do little to ensure that this taxpayer funded service remains open at all times.

Dr. Laura Blames Spitzer's Wife for his Prostitute Spree

On her radio show today, Dr. Laura Schlessinger was laughing. On the topic of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer being caught using a high-priced hooker service, The Today Show had interviewed a call girl to ask why husbands go to prostitutes. Dr. Laura was thrilled to learn that this "whore" gave the same advice she had been giving. It was advice Dr. Laura says she has been relentlessly attacked on blogs for daring to give.

According to Dr. Laura, the call girl said that if a woman doesn't want her guy to go to a prostitute, she should "put more energy into the relationship". The theme of Dr. Laura's book, "The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands", is that the modern women is neglecting her husband and may live to regret it.

Dr. Laura loves to give air time to anybody who antecdotally supports her book's thesis. Several times a week, she reads an email from a man who says he left his wife because she wasn't treating him like he had much value, and from a wife who says she regrets treating her husband like he was an afterthought, now that he has left.

Dr. Laura was giddy throughout her show today.

Dr. Laura and the call girl may have part of the truth, but only part in my opinion. I think there are a multitude of reasons why men use prostitutes, not the least of which is that men have trouble with monogomy because they're not hard-wired for it.

I was once told by a guy who himself used prostitutes that guys go to hookers because hookers will do things their wives are not into, like S&M. I thought of him when the media spoke to one of the call girls at the service Spitzer was using and she revealed that the boss had told them that "Client 9", Spitzer, could expect them to do things that were not always "safe."

Judging from the Reuters photo above of Spitzer standing with his wife Silda Wall Spitzer, the onus is now on him to put some energy into the relationship.

UPDATE: On Friday morning, Sue Davis, who has worked as an escort/prostitute in Vancouver for 22 years, was interviewed on CFUN radio by Shannon Nelson. Davis said, "Men who are happily married and are exploring sex with their wives don't come to sex workers."

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Read about the ring of Vancouver professors who sought sex behind the backs of their spouses: Simon Fraser University Asked to Disclose Sexual Harassment Ring to Donors