Thursday, April 01, 2004

No Limit Cat Burn With Fruit
part thumb at taste science though edge knowledge only left kiss he through then number broken tail almost name roll

I'm getting this sort of magnetic poetry/Melvins lyrics-style spam these days. It would be cool if it wasn't so evil and annoying.

shoe belief machine degree natural neck right cheap blow small tail bridge book for with doubt potato quiet rest position nerve not almost kiss kick organization wing female angry violent jump sneeze advertisement twist jump no limit cat burn with fruit humorice milk system see tree bright harbor other detail judge normal snake

Empire Games
On a side trip this morning to Benwell-Atkins, I walked down Glen Street past the VCC King Edward Campus. There's a little historical plaque at Glen and 8th that I've never noticed before. It pays homage to the Empire Oval, the velodrome built for the 1954 British Empire Games and demolished in 1980 to make way for the college.

The plaque features a tranquil and mysterious B&W photo of the empty racetrack, with its banked corners shining in the sunlight. I remember driving by it as a kid, but I never saw it up close. The velodrome was clearly a beautiful thing and I'm sure a lot of people were sad to see it join the other obsolete and dismantled sports facilities that litter this city.

I have the feeling that British Empire Games defined Vancouver in a way that Expo didn't and that the 2010 Olympics won't. Everybody knows about Landy and Bannister, but the games must have generated a lot of other compelling stories. Perhaps ACM can point me to the appropriate resources.

Other than stories, is there anything left of the 1954 Games? I think Empire Games Pool is still a going concern. There's the Miracle Mile Statue on the PNE grounds near Empire Stadium, which itself is long gone, bulldozed and trucked to the landfills like most of Vancouver's history.

And I guess the British Empire became the less Imperialist-sounding British Commonwealth. The task of modern-day empire building, as we're seeing, has been taken on by a bunch of amateurs.

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