I can never seem to get it together enough (<--life summed up) to actually put together an entry for this blog and I end up with a disjointed list of stuff.  This entry will continue in that not-so-fine tradition.  

• I recently found these two identical* postcards from Carcross at a rummage sale, and I was actually in Carcross last summer for a couple of hours while waiting to hop a bus to Whitehorse.  I don't know exactly how old this photo is, but I would guess it's from some time in the early 1990s, as the back of the postcard mentions "the old stern-wheeler SS Tutshi" was "recently" destroyed by fire and a quick internet search reveals that the Tutshi burned in 1990.  Of course, for all I know they could still be selling this postcard somewhere in Carcross, though I don't remember seeing it.  But really, why would I?  It's not an especially great photo of the town (trust me, I've been there!), which makes it kinda funny as a postcard photo.  Although none of them would make good postcard photos, I would like to show you some of the photos I took:

On the sandy shore of Bennett Lake

The store across from the train station.  It's on the postcard!  Below is a closer view of the card (see the pink building?):

And see the Caribou Hotel here (the big blue building)?  Here it is today:

This is the side of it.  It is now closed.  Note the doors to nowhere and the boarded-up windows.

• Kinda sad.  But this will be a more upbeat bullet point!  Hi, there.  So, this is something I do often:  buy an album (or request it as a gift and actually receive it) then not listen to it for years.  Yes, I fully acknowledge that I am absolutely terrible.  I also do that with books, but that's a bit of a different situation in which the library plays a major role (ably backed up by two strong supporting players, laziness and the always surprisingly small number of hours in a day).  I KNOW.  Remember my last entry, in which I confessed my Can-illiteracy?  Anyway, all this is a prelude to my making this woefully late proclamation:  Jason Collett's 2005 album Idols of Exile is great.  I just discovered this now, in 2011 (jeez-uz, is it really 2011 already?).  I think I got the album for Xmas the year I saw the film Everything's Gone Green because the song "Hangover Days" was used in it and it really caught my ear so I went home and looked it up and then listened to it a bunch of times on MySpace (remember that shit?).  So that was probably 2006 or 2007.  And I'm sure (because it's kinda my M.O.) that I probably listened to the album once or twice after I got it and was like, "Eh, whatever," then tossed it on the pile of Albums I'll Listen to Later and Will Probably End Up Loving.  And sure enough...  I looked on YouTube for a couple of the songs I really love but didn't get results.  The pickings are kind of slim for anything from this album, actually.  In fact, the official video for the album's first track that is posted on the official Arts & Crafts channel is messed up--the video is really pixelated and the music track skips!  However, I did find this which I don't want to embed but I will tell you that it is stills from the comically awful TV show One Tree Hill.  Weird.  Anyhow, I did find this video for "I'll Bring the Sun," which is pretty cute: 

• And so, listening to Idols of Exile got me thinking about Everything's Gone Green (though perhaps now I will associate it with One Tree Hill?  Oh, that would be sad), which I enjoyed when I saw it lo those many years ago (yeah, it actually played here for a week or so!).  The screenplay was written by Douglas Coupland and it's chock full of Coupland-y themes, and it's also really Vancouver-y.  It's fun to see a movie that's actually set in Vancouver, i.e. the city that has become American City Stand-in on several TV dramas and movies.  I found this scene from the movie on YouTube that was filmed (or, mostly filmed?) in a spot I know well.

Looking toward Sunset Beach (that flag across the inlet is visible in the clip).

Sunset Beach.  When I saw that sculpture, it made me think of this movie and the whale and that the sculpture looks like whale ribs.  The sculpture was installed in this spot a couple of years ago I think--before the movie, and of course there is no correlation except in my mind.

• And speaking of Douglas Coupland, I downloaded the first four of his Massey Lectures before a trip to Vancouver and listened to them on the train there and back.  When I came back home to my computer, I went to retrieve the fifth and final lecture but it never showed up in my iTunes (I subscribed to the series, and the fifth lecture hadn't become available before I left).  But apparently the CBC was being whack about it and possibly never made the fifth one available because there were lots of pissed off comments hinting at this on the IDEAS homepage.  Whatever.  So now I heard 4/5 of a novel being read to me and I am balking at both the idea of paying for a set of podcasts that I already have 4/5 of and at the idea of buying the book because having it read to me by Douglas Coupland was actually way awesome and I want to hear the rest of the book in his voice.  Which...is kind of sexy?  Can I say that??  No, I probably shouldn't.

• I would like to talk a little more about Douglas Coupland in this space in the future.  I am announcing my intentions to do this now because I am hoping that doing so will make me actually do it because I won't want to make a liar out of myself.  I am trying to, you know, actually get stuff done.  And I am also going to add that I will very soon be devoting an entire blog post to Dan Mangan.  You can take that one to the bank.

*Yeah, they're identical.  My scanner is a new addition to my household and we're still trying to work some things out, so it ended up cutting off some of what I was trying to scan.  Whatever, scanner!