Pique'n Yer Interest

BC Culture Days is six months away, but the province-wide festival of the arts and creative professions is already looking for participants. Early registration has opened for the festival, which runs this year from Sept. 26 to 28.

It's no secret that the most direct way to a journalist's heart is through the stomach. We're a simple folk, we reporters, and we enjoy our simple pleasures, which consist mostly of free food.

We were somewhere near the Weinerstrasse on the edge of Luzern when the bats appeared. It was pitch black and 5 a.m. so maybe bats weren't unusual.

I moved to the Manhattan of Squamish last week. And when I write week, I mean it. It took seven days in a kind of slow-mo nightmare that reminded me of the existence of my biceps and made my feet hurt. A lot.

One of my favourite side effects of the Winter Olympics is that it's the one time that Canadians are more unapologetically patriotic than any other.

Admit it: you were expecting Sochi's Winter Olympics to go a lot worse. And it's likely that whatever bar you set for these Games only continued to go lower as they drew near.

It's mid-February, 2014. The Sochi Olympics, a schizophrenic paean to everything both right and wrong with the world, is mid-stride.

Last summer, I was in Vancouver and went to a movie. At the Scotiabank Theatre, above the ticket sales kiosks, were 10 to 12 posters on display.

Maybe you watched an electrifying Seattle Seahawks squad win in thrilling fashion over their fierce rivals, the San Francisco 49ers earlier this month.

This week, the Canadian Olympic Committee will announce from Parliament Hill who will carry the Maple Leaf into the opening ceremonies in Sochi next month.