THE WEEKLY EH?! // September 19th, 2023
This week's highlight of FIVE things happening in the Kimberley/Cranbrook area + FOUR other items of some locals' interests.
Hi!
Welcome to the 19/9/23 edition of ‘THE WEEKLY EH?!’ newsletter!
Here’s Five Things
Since The 95EH Events Calendar gets updated with Kimberley AND Cranbrook area events on the regular (and it’s FREE for anybody to get their local events listed, just visit moun.town/events for the simple details), I like to do a weekly HIGHlight of FIVE things happening FOR the current week every Tuesday — as sometimes it’s nice to get a reminder of what’s going on before ‘the week ahead’ becomes another week gone by… and on that note:
THING #1: It’s Wildsight’s second annual ‘Field To Fork’ fundraiser — “a celebratory event inspired by the 100-mile diet where everything, including wine, art, and music, comes from our community and the surrounding areas” — which is being held this Wednesday at Biscuit: A Place to Sup on the Platzl. So CLICK HERE for all the lovely local details of who & what is involved in this lovely local event (because this is the kind of event where, even if you’re not one of the 70 ticket holders come dinner time, it’s still nice to know that people are putting on stuff like this in the area)!
THING #2: As the kids are surely saying on the playground “things 👏 are 👏 going 👏 down” at Kimberley Public Library this Wednesday! More specifically speaking: there’s a ‘Storytime at the Library’ EVERY Wednesday at 10:30–11:30am for preschool age children, plus there’s a ‘LEGO Club at the Library’ EVERY Wednesday at 3:30pm-4:30pm for children 6 & up — AND — this specific Wednesday, the 20th of September, there’s a ‘Genealogy Basics with B.C. Genealogy Society’ zoom workshop that is FREE to attend for all library patrons. And while we’re listing things that our platzl library makes available for the community, because it’s not just a Wednesday thing, there’s also an all ages Dungeons & Dragons campaign on Thursdays (and a junior-edition for kids aged 9-14 on Saturdays), plus there’s also a ‘Pop Up Saturday Kids Club’ EVERY Saturday from 10:30am - 11:30 am for children 5 & up — AND — starting this Saturday, September 23rd, you’ll be able to check-out a family outdoor adventure kit with your library card (“each kit has resources, books, guides and binoculars to help you explore your backyard and beyond” and is suitable for children Grades K-7)! I also hear that, with these library cards that they give you for FREE if you don’t already have one, you can also borrow books and dvds and audiobooks, physical and digital, all for FREE! Local libraries… they sound almost too good to be true sometimes, eh?!
THING #3: Pender Island’s Peach & Quiet are coming all the way across BC to play at Grist & Mash this Thursday, and because the internet has ruined how my brain works, I couldn’t help but think of the following meme-based concert poster based on the artist & establishment’s shared affinity for ampersands…
But don’t base your Thursday night plans on whether or not your brain also thinks in memes, instead, just use a little more internet to listen to the latest Peach & Quiet release on Bandcamp and then think about whether you’d like to mix that music-making with a little Grist & Mash later this week.
THING #4: Is it just me or has Cranbrook really amped up their amount of ‘fests’ this year? Because we’re not even a week removed from Cranbrook Rib Fest and I find myself back here again, swapping out just one word, to tell you about a thing called Cranbrook Beer Fest (happening Saturday, September 23rd, from 12pm – 5pm at Balment Park). “The Victoria Beer Society is thrilled to partner with the BC Ale Trail and Cranbrook Tourism to host the first-ever Great Canadian Beer Festival heading on tour to Cranbrook, BC! Cranbrook Beer Festival will provide an unforgettable craft beer experience, offering 50+ craft beers from across British Columbia and Canada. Combining the best breweries in the Kootenay region with and array of craft beers brought in exclusively from Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.” 🍻
THING #5: It must be ‘Tribute Week’ at Key City Theatre, as both ABBA* and JOHNNY CASH* are performing live in Cranbrook this week!!! (*songs performed by touring tribute acts obvs) ABBA REVISITED goes down on Wednesday night…
And then the JOHNNY CASH tribute goes down on Saturday night with David James & Big River — who I didn’t know was a Johnny Cash tribute until I start looking around on the internet for a band by the same name and came across this video on Youtube of David James talking about being a Johnny Cash tribute act (which I think does a good job of showing the appreciation for the original music that is at the heart of the “this is just a tribute” world of tribute artists).
Of course, there's always more than Five Things happening in any given week, including this week, so don't forget you can always punch -> moun.town/events <- into any browser window at any time and be magically taken to THE 95EH EVENTS CALENDAR to see all the other events happening this week and beyond (and you can always reach out via email to 'hey@95eh.ca' if you have something of local area interest/intrigue that you think would be a good fit for a HWY 95EH signal boost) 👍
+ Four Ehs
And because there’s always more going on than just the local area events that get added to The 95EH Events Calendar, here’s 4 other things that are proving to be top of mind for at least one local area person (ie. myself):
EH #1: I first heard about the “1 MILLION MARCH 4 CHILDREN” protest on Twitter a couple months ago, and then, like a lot of other delusional things I see on social media that fall under the banners of ‘anti-woke selective freedoms’, I rolled my eyes & scrolled away to something less spiritually draining and forgot about it. At least until a few weeks ago that is, when the public Facebook event called ‘Million Person March’ (which will start outside of a Tim Hortons, because of course it will) started showing up in my search results for Cranbrook area events (for extra context, one of the FB accounts that created the event is a group called ‘East Kootenay Freedom Family’… and, yes, the posts in that group are exactly what you’re imagining). “Oh yeah,” I thought to myself, “this must be the local manifestation of that ignorant national protest I saw getting roasted on Twitter many moons ago.”
And since I need to first manually mark 95EH as ‘Interested’ in a Facebook event before that event gets included in the process that pulls local Facebook events into The 95EH Events Calendar, sometimes I have to make a personal judgement call on whether to include a local event or not. Usually, it’ll be because something is not really an event meant for the “public” (like when a birthday party or a wedding shows up in the search results), BUT, sometimes it’ll be like this situation, where I find myself having to decide whether or not to include a “local event” that represents everything I find so disappointing about the current divisive state of the world (ie. proud hypocritical hateful ignorance). Well, surprising no one, it was an easy decision for me to NOT include this “local event” in The 95EH Events Calendar. And then, once again, I rolled my eyes and scrolled away and kind of forgot about the whole thing (hoping it would maybe just fizzle out under the weight of its own bad vibes).
Until this last weekend that is, when I had a conversation with a fellow community gardener, whilst moving compost from one pile to another, about a counter-protest that he was going to be attending on Wednesday in Cranbrook with some friends & family. And, sure enough, I then started seeing some encouraging posts from both Kimberley Pride Society and Cranbrook Pride popping up on the local socials about mutual support and counter-protest details (along with encouraging words/shares from locals & local businesses, The Spiral Path being a good example of that being done really well). Anyways, ya love to see it (and ya hope to see more & more of it… until we’re living in a society where we start needing to see it less & less) ✊
EH #2: On a related topic to things that ‘ya love to see & hope to see more of’ (or at least things that I love to see & hope to see more of), I wanted to give a shout-out to Kimberley City Councillor Sue Cairns again for continuing to use her Facebook page to openly engage so-called “controversial” topics out in the public eye, most notably with this ‘open letter’ post aimed towards the Conservative politicians representing our shared area.
Because if we’re ever going to get a better hold on the reigns of the society we have to live in together, we’re going to need to get better at openly sharing what we stand for personally & collectively + be willing to engage in conversations around difficult topics like politics and religion (and sexuality and class and etc) — without immediately melting into self-defensive piles of goo. Otherwise those who benefit from controlling the narrative are going to continue pushing the ‘window of public discourse/understanding’ further and further to the far right towards fascism (and our current view through the Overton Window is already positioned so far to the right of centre that fully-formed adult brains think politicians like Trudeau & Biden are full-blown “leftists”… I guess because words don’t really mean anything anymore if no one is going to be working with the same definitions).
EH #3: Before someone yells at me for picking on Conservatives / The Right Wing (and how I must be some kind of blind idiot to not know that actually it is Trudeau/Biden who suck and are to blame for everything because woke-socialist-libtardism), I would just like to remind people that during the last Canadian federal election, I tried to make a pitch that ‘NOBODY should vote Conservative OR Liberal’. And it’s a pitch I’ve made before (and will make again at the next election). Because I think BOTH of those parties mostly just represent the offensive and defensive line of the same ruling class mindset that’s been behind our entire colonial/imperial past AND present (and continuing to fall into the “yeah… but the other side is even worse than the side that I have to ignore all integrity & reality in order to keep supporting” thinking just leads us to the same troubling results).
Hopefully colonial/imperial capitalism won’t be our forever future too, but I do worry, as it seems that Pierre Poilievre’s populist BS is resonating with more & more of the very people getting burned by the very system selling them on even more burning (Worried about Big Pharma? Vote for the party actively trying to privatize health care! Against oppression? Vote for the party actively removing the rights of your friends and neighbours… no, not the neighbours that look just like you, the other ones!). But don’t listen to me go on about it, listen to someone like George Carlin go on about it (it’s funner) — and then ask yourself what you think GC would tell you about a politician like PP (and, yes, Carlin would also tear down Trudeau/Biden, for similar reasons, but that’s also kinda the main point being made here).
But I guess it can be scary to wake up if people are afraid of being called “woke” 🙃
EH #4: And on a related-but-also-lighter note, a different gardener friend up at the KEGG.CA community garden sent me some poetry of his to see if I would be interested in sharing on my platforms, and even though we’re still mid-conversation about what might be the best way to share his poems online (ie. I keep trying to tell Bernie that he should start a free Tumblr website or poetry Instagram account, as that way I could link out to where people could check out more of his stuff, but he is less sure about this), I couldn’t help but think of my personal fave of the poems Bernie shared with me—especially with my other EH topics going a bit “political” this week—so here is Bernie’s poem entitled ‘Apology’ (and then I will let you know when we figure out how we might go about sharing some more of Bernie’s poems, maybe even attempt to engage a local poetry sharing thing or something through 95EH’s socials).
Of course, there’s always more ‘eh?!’ to share than the 4 EHs that came to my mind while putting together this week’s newsletter, so please make sure to follow 95EH on the Facebook & Instagram & Tumblr (especially if you ever frequent the highway 95/a/eh area IRL where these URL signals are getting relayed from). And for more Jeremy/HI54-specific stuff, you can also follow @HI54LOFI on the Instagram & Twitter & Facebook.
Because, hey… there’s a lot of stuff going on out there, eh?!
Until next week…
Please feel free to reach out to ‘hey@95eh.ca’ if you have any questions, comments, ideas and/or schemes — and if you think you know anybody else that might enjoy receiving this weekly newsletter about “some locals’ interests” in the highway 95/a/eh area, please feel warmly encouraged to send them a link so they can have a think about signing up too!
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Jeremy // HI54LOFI