Dandelion Records & Emporium, a design store located on Main and Broadway (2442 Main Street), is a place that I can honestly lose myself in for hours while admiring their nice selection of stationary. Not only do they carry amazing stationary, they also have many well thought out and designed items and records.

In Oct. 2008, store owner Laura Frederick decided to resign as manager at a design store in Yaletown and open Dandelion Emporium. As her husband had a shop just around the corner, Dandelion Records, they decided to merge the two together in May 2009, making it into Dandelion Records and Emporium.

They arrive at parties with bottles of beer you have never heard of, stouts, ales and lagers with names like Dogfish Head, Anchor Steam and Polygamy Porter, cases brought back from a trip to the States and recycled glass jugs they get refilled by their friends who work for local watering holes and breweries. They have beer memberships, wear beer pins and forgo music festivals for ones about beer.

You can't blame them though. With specialty beer stores popping up all over and existing stores expanding their craft beer selection, it is actually becoming more difficult to make a decision about what to drink each night when faced with rows upon rows of heady deliciousness.

Somehow, I doubt those people will come out in such awe-inspiring numbers when the Paralympics come to a close -- especially given the sadly lukewarm turnout for the torch ceremony this past week (Twitter updates stated that "it looked like the only people in attendance were family members and the occasional confused bystander.") The streets are back to being a sea of black coats without much representation of the Canada gear everyone was wearing a few weeks ago. Why the lack of support? Is one type of athlete more worthy of our attention than another? A friend told me that Canadians "just don't really care about disabled athletes in the same way as the superhuman ones." I beg to differ. My hypothesis is that a great deal of our Olympics-related nationalism (or, in the Paralympics' case, lack thereof) is directly related to the amount of media and corporate attention focused on the whole Games themselves.

Now, I don't want to turn the mainstream media into the sacrificial lamb here. While CTV still refuses, despite protests, to broadcast the Paralympics closing ceremonies live (ironic given their unabashed saturation of every possible airwave, billboard and commercial spot during last month's Olympics), I will give them credit for providing the largest amount of coverage ever given to the Paralympics by Canada. However, I really think we can do better -- and I also think that if the mainstream media gave Paralympic athletes more of a chance to share their (pretty amazing) stories, Canadians would readily give them the support they deserve. Is this a naive assumption? Let's look at some of the details.

I recommend watching this sweet live video of Aidan Knight performing his song "Jasper" with Dan Mangan.

Shot by Dan Mangan's brother, Neil Mangan, the two musicians stopped for a jam session outside while passing through the rockies -- nice scenery and song. Check it out below!

Now, it's not a bad song -- despite the obvious nationalism associated with flag waving -- until some rapper who wants really badly to sound like Lil Wayne comes in and says, "take a look around, what if it happened here?" Listening to it made me think about his question. No sooner did Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine come to mind than I thought, "it wouldn't happen here."

Katrina, New Orleans, Haiti: these places are kept in such a constant economic catch-up game with the World Bank that they couldn't possibly pay back their debt, so they are more susceptible to massive infrastructure failure -- and thus chaos -- than a city like Vancouver. Which then, of course, leads to orchestrated and often privately contracted clean-up jobs. An earthquake here would wreak havoc, but we aren't a third-world country -- although you just know some developer is thinking about all those weakened brick hotels in the DTES. Maybe they'll sit on that property a little longer.

On March 10, 2010 Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson officially opened the Dunsmuir Viaduct bike lane with a quick cruise on what was a typically rainy Vancouver morning. The protected two-lane bike path, lined with cement barriers, finally provides commuters with a safe cycling route from the Adanac Bikeway into downtown Vancouver.

Dipped in homemade liquid adhesive made from vegetable starch and water and based on a craft fostered since ancient times, these lovingly-applied (and often immediately torn-down) paste-up pieces are notorious and important parts of the urban street art scene. Every city I've been to around the world has its own forms of paste-ups -- whether they are called "wheatpastes," "flyposts" or "poster bombs." Many are outwardly political and display controversial ideas, some are beautiful and whimsical, and almost all are applied and maintained by anonymous, faceless artists.

The whole idea of sharing one's artwork without intending to make a profit -- indeed, with the knowledge that by revealing that art, one risks getting arrested -- is a romantic concept. As an artist myself, I believe it also raises some important questions. Should the role of the artist be to please the public or to embody philosophical ideals? What is ultimately more satisfying -- to make money off one's work or to participate in subversive artistic movements?

Dichotomous concepts like these mirror similarly polarized legacies of some of the most well-loved (and hated) street artists of our generation, from the gorilla-faced (and feminist-minded) Guerrilla Girls to the anonymous Parisian student Princess Hijab to the famous Banksy to the timeless Posterchild. Philosophical debates aside, here are a few of Vancouver's most well known paste-ups.

I remember when the transit plan was announced months ago, that there was doom-and-gloom projections over just how awful traffic was going to be if we shut down all these roads and took away all this curbside parking. But, a few days into the Olympics, it was obvious that those prophecies of gridlock and honking horns hadn't come to pass. Instead, the roads were much clearer, with Translink reportedly reaching their goal of reducing road traffic by 30%. In fact, after talking to those that still drove by car into work during the Olympics, they found their commute faster.

It has long been argued that expanding roads and access to roads to alleviate congestion may in fact actually exacerbate it in the future. This is the kind of 'if you build it they will come' thinking -- where with more roads come more cars -- that urban planner Jane Jacobs spoke of in her 1960s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Basically, Jacobs' conclusion was that giving preference to cars, which she called the "erosion of cities", breeds more cars, but giving preference to other forms of transportation , which she called the "attrition of automobiles," breeds better alternatives.

It's not the most appetizing experience, and it may be a small part of why people on a quest for clean, healthy drinking water still choose to buy one-time-use water bottles instead of filling up a reusable bottle at a public tap or water fountain.

Here's a thought: if there were machines stationed around Vancouver that would pump out free, mineralized, filtered water for you to refill your water bottle with, would you use them?

Live music picks from Wednesday, March 11 to Tuesday, March 16, 2010

This weekend, while lying in a sunny grass field off Victoria and 38th, I realized that the whole area is a bit like that new guy in class with the James Dean-style haircut and worn leather jacket -- it's scruffy, edgy and a little off-beat, just enough to stand out from the crowd (ie, the south Granvilles and Cambies, yawn.) Also, although it has some of the same interests as me (good Mexican food, Vietnamese people, weird meat shops and locals) there's just something about it that remains elusive and intimidating.

Maybe its the baffling mishmash of ethnic foods or the way the street looks like it will continue infinitely into the horizon, kind of like Queen's street in Toronto when you get close to the Eastern European area. Perhaps it lies in the fact that I have never been invited to even one house party in the area. Or perhaps it's the faded brightness of street-side buildings and the lack of condominiums or height of any kind in the surrounding market-style vicinity. Either way, upper Victoria St. continues to leave me feeling somewhat bewildered as a non-Vancouver native.

However, it's the kind of bewilderment that I know is easily solved, at least when it comes to the elusive new guy in class, by going out for a few drinks to ease the situation up a bit. So, for the Victoria-Fraserview neighborhood, I decided to initiate the virtual equivalent of those drinks -- a bit of quality old-fashioned Wikipedia e-stalking to find out exactly what this Victoria neighbourhood is really all about.

What they have in mind is a superstar architect designing a superstar building that will be twice as big as the current building. This is a surefire way, it seems, to build international attention to your gallery, as seen with Toronto's addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum, both done by internationally renowned architects and the focus of much debate in Toronto.

The VAG has rejected a site at False Creek, and has their eyes set currently on the parking lot near the Queen Elizabeth Theatre -- the site of the Vancouver Olympics Livecity Downtown concert and pavilion grounds. The catch? The land is so valuable that the VAG may have to share it with (what else?) condominium buildings, which would definitely put a crimp in the VAG's plans to have a stand-alone architecturally eye-popping building. It's not surprising though, as Vancouver's cultural attractions are usually attached in some way to a condo tower through density transfers, so perhaps in some cynical way it is almost fitting for Vancouver's art gallery to be dependent on condo towers.

Province slashes gaming grants to arts, culture, sports groups. Hey, that gold medal game was great huh?

How does The Guardian like us now? Cypress Bowl re-opens for business Tuesday. That makes no sense. Did you have to airlift snow during the Olympics? And is there so little so pack that potential water shortages are forecast this summer?

Where it was once cool to loudly champion women's rights, many women now balk at being labeled a "feminist." In many eyes, the feminist movement should have ended with emancipation, the right to work outside of the home, university degrees and the rise of the mini-skirt. "They have equality and jobs, what can they possibly want now?" some ask. There are men and women who feel the gender equality campaign has made "enough" progress.

But when we witness the Canadian Women's Ski Jumpers in court numerous times unsuccessfully fighting to have their sport instated in the Olympic Games, when journalists comment on the fashion sense of our female politicians before their political abilities, when women are still struggling to make the same wages as men, and girls still feel a boob job will get them happiness, it is hard to be satisfied with this so-called level of equality.