devotees of small-town newspapers should enjoy the lively and attractively archived Sayward Compass, which I came across researching a possible trip up-Island...

a big thumbs up from ARMOND!

"Their big chase scene remains an exercise in shrill excitation."

website for huge South Nanaimo Lands project, around a km north of us--


"Northwest Properties and Snuneymuxw First Nation have jointly purchased approximately 726 acres of vacant freehold land located in the south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. The land straddles the Island Highway and Duke Point Highway.

The overall project contemplates the development of the land into a complete and integrated master-planned community consisting of residential, retail, recreational, commercial, educational and industrial uses. The development is expected to be phased over a 10 to 15 year period relative to market demand.

This project is in the initial planning stages, and the partnership will be actively engaged in community consultation through the City of Nanaimo's Official Community Plan amendment process."

enjoyed the great Philip Baker Hall in Robert Altman's Secret Honor tonight--

"In order to find another performance like it in cinema you have to go all the way back to the full-bore theatricality of a Charles Laughton or John Barrymore; actors who thrived on the knowledge that, whether on stage or on film, every eye in the house was trained on them. There is, in fact, a more than tiny resemblance between Hall’s Nixon as he rages maniacally from one end of his study to the next — as though trying in vain to outrace his thoughts — and the feral performances Barrymore gave in films like Twentieth Century or Hold That Co-ed. It’s not a species of camp or old-school hamminess of the George Arliss variety that Hall engages in. What he recaptured through his Nixon was a spirit of luminous madness that had been refined out of screen acting (generally replaced by more dour histrionics); crucified upon a cross of joyless nuance by otherwise fine directors like Elia Kazan — and many more not-so-fine ones. By taking Nixon to both comic and tragic extremes, by playing him to that proverbial hilt, he achieves the rhetorical truth Freed and Stone were aiming for, that they knew was there all along..."

happy 3rd to toddling Anodyne, Chris Brayshaw's peerless blog conflation of walker, bookstore owner, photographer, critic, investor and hopelessly besotted Nanaimophiliac...

Tsawassen trees