Yumi and I checked out the Nikkei Garden Farmer’s Market this morning at the Nikkei National Museum and Culural Centre, just up the hill from our place in south Burnaby, BC.
Yumi got some plants and a bag full of used Japanese novels.
There’s an excellent exhibition in the gallery on women in STEM.
For Throwback Thursday, how about we go back to July 5, 1976, and the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix coverage of the Mohyla Institute 60th Anniversary show? Yikes!
I’d forgotten all about this until some garage cleaning today turned it up. My short stage acting career! 
I vaguely recall having multiple roles as a young romancer, a WWI Ukrainian-Canadian soldier, and as renowned Ukrainian dance instructor Vasyl Avramenko.
I was angry and sad to come across several of these posters on my walk in SE Burnaby and New Westminster today. They were on the urban trail that runs along the Skytrain tracks between Taylor Park and 22nd St. Station.
Over the last year or two it seems such incidents have been increasing, be it harrassment of women, or of Asians, or. . .
I’m angry that woman and people of colour walk in fear, and sad to find it in my back yard.
I had a lovely evening at the Burnaby Art Gallery chatting with folks about streamkeeping and the Stream of Dreams Murals Society watershed education and art program at the cool Uninterruped VR salmon show.
We visited Terra Nova Park in Richmond, BC, for the first time today.
A beautiful place but some awkward history.
The plan today:
Up at 5:00am and get some stuff done.
Crank all the windows open until 7:00. Then batten down the hatches and hunker down while the temperature steadily climbs to ~42C (107F) here in Burnaby, BC, peaking between 2:00 – 4:00pm.
Thank you tall trees of Byrne Creek Ravine Park that keep us shaded until noonish.
Supposedly it will be back down to 30C by 10:00pm, and a bearable 23-25 overnight.
Check in on vulnerable family, friends, and neighbours.
Stay safe, all. . .
UPDATE: And watch out for pets, too. Sora the Cat quickly figured out that an ice-water filled bed warmer is a great place to hang out :-).
UPDATE 2: As of mid-afternoon it now looks like we’ll top out around 36C instead of over 40. Whew!
Gina Chong (ART PROJECT) – Slideshow for the National Day of Action against Anti-Asian Racism – MATURE CONTENT.
This has to be shared for we are all in this together. The hate must stop.
In solidarity. . .
Wearing the colour for #RedDressDay on my Byrne Creek walk in Burnaby, BC. this morning.
Long out of print, I found a copy of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake on Abe Books.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a thought-provoking review of the book in 2011, and why she thought it disappeared:
Theory #1: Ophidiophobia. The phobia is common and extends to pictures, even the mention, of snakes; and the book features them even in the title. A heroine who lets snakes crawl on her, and she’s named Snake? Oh, icky . . .Theory #2: Sex. It’s an adult book. Snake, though, is barely more than a kid, setting out on her first trial of prowess, so that young women can and do identify with her, happily or longingly, as they do with Ayla in Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children books, though Snake’s taste in men is far better than Ayla’s. But could the book be approved in schools? The sexual mores are as various as the societies, including some very unorthodox customs, and Snake’s sexual behavior is both highly ethical and quite uninhibited. . .
Given the relentless fundamentalist vendettas against “witchcraft” and “pornography” (read imaginative literature and sexual realism) in the schools, few teachers in the 1980s could invite the firestorm that might be started by a right-wing parent who got a hint of how young Snake was carrying on. . .
Theory #3. The hypothesis of gendered reprinting. It appears that as a general rule books written by men get reprinted more frequently and over more years than books written by women.”