Nathaniel Christopher - Blog

If you ever need to feel old or irrelevant there’s perhaps no better place to hang out than your local thrift store where items that seemed so marvelous and useful in your youth are unceremoniously stashed between faded Christian books and stained tweed blouses.

The other day I was at the Salvation Army store at West Boulevard and 41st in Kerrisdale where I happened upon a few objects that show how distant and irrelevant my own youth has become.

The cd rack which was full of albums and singles that I still listen to, I can’t imagine the sad soul who would get rid of Jewel’s “Pieces of You” album or Sugar Ray’s flawless “Every Morning” cd single but it was good to re-add them to my collection at only $1.99 a pop.

I did, however, spot a few items that really are irrelevant and silly.

Observe this very bulky Oritron DVD player manufactured at a time when most DVD  functions were accessible through buttons on the player itself.  If you lost your remote, like I do all the time, you could still play your movie. Not bad.

Oritron DVD Player

It also has another special feature that you don’t see on many players anymore – Y2K Compliance. It still has an official-looking silver sticker which reads “Year 2000 Y2K Compliant” and assures potential customers that it is “certified” by an unspecified “international testing laboratory”.

y2k sticker

Still, some people in the ‘90s were laggards when it came to new technology. I was using a Beta until sometimes in the mid ‘90s and didn’t get a DVD player until 2003 and I imagine there are still people out there who only have a VCR so they might appreciate the value of this Safety 1st VCR Lock. For $1.99 you could save  hands, sandwiches and other body parts from the unforgiving wrath of a VCR motor.

Throughout the Olympics I’ve really been impressed by the presence of other Canadian provinces and Territories in Vancouver.  It’s good to see and feel the presence of the different regions of Canada. It’s a lot more substantial and real than a series of provincial and territorial flags neatly assembled at some public space.

I really think that that’s a diversity is a huge part of Canadian identity and  geography plays a huge part in that.

Yesterday I was downtown and noticed this cute truck advert at the corner of Robson and Homer:

Compliments of Ontario, Canada

My first thought was “how nice!” Then I read it and thought “hmm! I didn’t know that Ontario provided water to Vancouver. Neat!” Then I thought “Hmm… maybe this is  a statement about our public water and how Ontario water is better…”

Then I turned to a lady wearing a trillium emblazoned sweater who was packing up water bottles and Ontario pins.

“Is it true that Ontario provides metro Vancouver with water,” I ask.

“Oh no,” she says smiling. “It comes from that fire hydrant right over there. It’s very local water.”

Vancouver fire hydrant

Still,  I thought it was pretty cool to see a physical presence of Ontario right here in Vancouver. The water wasn’t from Ontario, but the sentiment sure was.  Adverts of British Columbia normally tout the natural or “God-given” beauty of the land.  That was accidental and speaks nothing of the human accomplishments out here. I think a kind gesture, like a glass of water, speaks more about a place than some over the top nature photos.

The other day while running errands Housemate decided to bring home some supper from McDonald’s. It really was a thoughtful gesture. Housemate is always buying me McDonald’s. He’s really cool that way.

Usually it’s great, but this time it was a disaster.

He comes back with a Big Mac meal. The Coke is cold. The fries are cold. The Big Mac is cold. Cold McDonald’s food tastes like dog food mixed with wet shoelaces. It’s nasty. Dinner is shot, but at least I have a cold drink. But really, there’s no excuse for this as there’s a McDonald’s not far from our house. Even when I walk there the food is still hot when I come home.

When I ask him “What the fuck?!?” he informs me that he picked it up at a McDonald’s that’s like a half-hour drive from our house! Housemate, who is a chemist and PhD student, completely forgot about Einstein’s theory that McDonald’s food purchased closer to home will probably be lest nasty for Nathaniel and his cat. Shame!

“Just put it in the microwave!” He scolds. “I don’t know what it is you have against the microwave but when I heat stuff up in there it tastes fine.”

He nukes his Quarter Pounder and fries and the kitchen fills up with the aroma of melting stray dogs. It’s wrong. Heating up cold McDonald’s in a microwave has little to do with food preparation. It’s some kind of unholy necromancy.  I don’t know how he can call himself an atheist ‘cause that there was full on sacrifice to the devil.

McDonald's in the microwave

Although he insists there is nothing wrong with re-heating McDonald’s food he was quite adamant that the above photo NOT be taken or posted anywhere on a blog. But as a journalist and maverick I believe the public has a right to know.

Friends don’t let friends bite into cold McDonald’s food.

Khan poses with Housemate's lottery winnings

Many working class people fantasize about what to do when they win the lottery but a fantasy for many became today a reality for my housemate who won $10 in the lotto.

A week or two ago Housemate purchased  what he described as a “222 ticket” who has since misplaced the ticket and receipt.

“I bought some of that fake orange juice,” he says. “You know, that stuff you hate. What do you call it. Ah, SunnyD!”

The SunnyD, according to Housemate, came to “$3 and some change” which leaves approximately $6.50 in change.

He asked me to use the $5 bill to buy some “beverages” a word we use to describe those 12 packs of Coke you can get. I, however, have no intention of going out to buy anything. I’m feeling lazy so the $5 will just have to sit in his wallet for a bit longer.

As for the change, he has “no idea” as to how he’ll spend it.

Well, tonight I went to a wonderful Christmas party at my friend Caitlin’s house. Her mom and dad did a wonderful job feeding and drinking us up. They are probably the most gracious, kind hearted people I know.

But that’s not what I want to address here.

I come home and find this note on my computer:

Nathaniel - I fed Khan already (about 2 PM) you do not need to feed him again tonight. I also gave him lots of treats.

It’s from my housemate. He’s worried that I feed my cat too much. There was a time not too long ago when Khan managed to “double dip” on his wet food servings by acting hungry as soon as one of us came home.  Housemate, for example, might feed Khan before going to work in the morning but by the time I wake up his food dish might be empty. Thinking he hasn’t had his morning wet food I’ll fill up his bowl.

Aware of this situation and ever worried about Khan’s expanding waste line housemate left me a note .

But why did he used crappy old WordPad instead of Microsoft Word? I asked him!

“It was just a quick little note,” says housemate. “WordPad is a smaller program which has the same functionality for small typing jobs. No spell checker etc of course but you can type into it and print stuff.”

Fair enough. But it would have been good if I saw this note BEFORE Khan approached me with his sweet “feed me” meows. But, housemate wanted to be kind to the environment and so he did the note on the screen.

So… here’s a shot of Khan eating his third feeding of the day:

Khan eating supper

Props to housemate who gave me a $25 Future Shop gift card. I used that to buy batteries for the camera that took this photo.

The other works I noticed this poster near Hastings and Willingdon. It’s since been ripped down and replaced with fireworks adverts so I thought I’d blog about it.

It’s a message from Bill Bennett extolling the virtues of Expo 86. Bennett was the Social Credit premier of British Columbia from 1975 until 1986. I’m too young to really have any kind of visceral grudge against him, but I know of a lot of my older friends do.

But as much as I disagree with the Social Credits it was really refressing to see the words “Premier” next to a name and photo of someone who isn’t Gordon Campbell.

But why then are these 23 year old posters plastered across the city? It was a real “what the fuck” moment to see this alongside movie and concert notices. My first thought it was that it was some kind of Olympic initiative to quell anti-Olympic sentiment among the masses by appealing to that bullshit hipster nostalgia for all things ’80s.

I might be right.

There was some barely visible text on the bottom left corner of the poster with a url to the Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. Their website says it’s the largest non-profit photographic art gallery in Western Canada.

The piece is part of the public installation “Something’s Happening Here” by Berlin-based artist Jeremy Shaw. He’s taken a bunch of old posters and images from Expo 86 and they have been plastered all over Vancouver as part of the so-called “Cultural Olympiad”.

A press release for the exhibit describes it as such:

“Something’s Happening Here joins an ongoing dialogue on how global events like Expo
and the Olympics impact on civic space through an architectural legacy of buildings
and monuments, and signifi cantly, how such events live on through a collective civic
memory.”

As a B.C. history buff I think the old posters are sort of cool. Vancouver seems to be a city that moves and changes so quickly that it seems to lose connection with its history. So I think most iniatives to preserve our history are good.

But the haunting question here is: what history do we choose to present? Or more accurately, what message are THEY trying to cram down our throats?

While arts and community organizations across the province are being slaughtered with funding cuts it seems that there is still enough money to plaster the city with Expo pride. It’s as if they are saying “people were all excited and proud to host Expo so you should feel the same way about the Olympics!”

Art is invarialbly used as a tool by the people to question or critique the status quo but it is also used by the establishment to drive home their message.

This cooking video has been making the rounds lately. It shows a super-morbidly-obese woman making a very unhealthy macaroni salad.

If you haven’t seen the video I encourage you to watch it:

Here are the ingredients:

-1 can of sweetened condensed milk
-1 pint of real mayonaise
-1 cup of sugar
-1 cup of white vinegar
-1 lb of elbow pasta
-1 green pepper, 3 stalks of celery, 1 large onion, shredded carrots

The salad has 6805 calroies, 358 grams of fat (68 of which are saturated).

Perhaps it was morbid curiosity or just good old fashioned reckless disregard for my health, but I went out today to buy the ingredients to make the salad. I figured that something so monstrously unhealthy has to at least taste good.

It didn’t.

I followed the recipe exactly as she instructs in the video. I let it chill but the end result was an oversweet, gloopy waste of calories.

Sara, the fat lady in the video, says the sweetness is balanced out with the tang of vinegar. It’s not. It tastes overly sweet and creamy. Sort of like a dessert, but with chunks of celery, onions and macaroni. Sara says not to worry about all the dressing. She says it’ll be absorbed by the pasta and vegetables. That hasn’t happened yet. Several hours in the fridge and it’s still somewhat soupy.

Say no to Wanda’s Macaroni Salad!

Was this white out stolen?

Housemate has some white out.

My legal team has advised me not to say that he stole it, but I’ve done a thorough search of the house and have thus far been unable to procure a receipt for it. Furthermore, he has not gone to any office supply stores lately. It’s possible he purchased it at Safeway or Shoppers, but again, there’s no evidence of this and he never buys office supply stuff when we go there.

When confronted with the cold facts of this case Housemate looked at me with a startled expression and said “are you actually going to blog about the white out?” When I pressed him to explain the origins of the white out he declined further comment and politely requested that I leave his room.

I can’t say that Housemate is guilty of theft (that’s for the courts to decide) but there is an office supply cabinet somewhere missing a container of white out.

Shame!

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Something kind of spooky happened the other day during a visit with my good friend Shantel.

We were having a conversation about my father, a somewhat intense one at that. I’m thinking of doing some writings based on his life experiences and was asking Shantel for her sage advice when I noticed one of the lights on her track lighting fixture was sort of flickering.

ghostly light

“It’s been doing that for a while now,” she said.

I got an eerie vibe from the flickering and immediately thought of the stories I heard growing up about how ghosts tend to make their presence known through electricity.

“If you’re there,” I say to the light. “Flicker right. About. NOW.”

As soon as I finish saying “now” the light flickers.

“Ooh! I’m getting scared, Nathaniel!” says Shantel.

“Ah, that could just be a silly coincidence, let me see if it’ll respond to numbers.”

I command the light to flicker twice. It does so. I’m still not convinced.

“Okay, none of this flickering bullshit,” I command. “If there is a spirit there I want you to turn right the fuck off an then go on. Full on and full off!”

THE LIGHT GOES ON AND OFF!

At this point I am freaked out.

I turn off the light switch and put an end to our impromptu channeling session.