Camping out in downtown Vancouver (aka the Hollywood North Annex) for a little while.

Beautiful city if you ever get the chance.  Lots to do, sea breezes off the water, friendly people, thriving immigrant communities from seemingly half the planet, killer food and coffee, good transport, and a government which for all its faults remains fairly unriddled with buffoons who confuse  violence with vision.

Getting pricey for Americans, though, thanks to the way running up debt tends to run down the dollar.  (Half a trillion thrown into war, then the TV news anchors are shocked when the greenback declines.  Yeesh.)

When I was in college, my buddy Phil and I used to take roadies up to Toronto, change our money, buy stuff, change our money back, and still have surprising amounts of our original cash.  Such a deal.

Not no more.  At this moment, C$1 = US$1.03.  And climbing (as it will likely continue to do).  So Canadians are now coming to the US for bargain sprees.

I can already imagine a bunch of Canadian college kids heading south for the weekend, laughing at our quaint monochrome currency without any ducks, queens, or Inuit carvings on it.

I wonder how much farther the Bushpeso will fall. 

Meet Australia’s increasingly vulnerable quokka, courtesy my Trebekistan pal Dara (who in turn I think cribbed this guy from Cute Overload):

I’ve seen quokkas in Aussie zoos several times, but their natural range (the southwest bit of Western Australia) and mine have yet to overlap in the wild.  Quokkas may look more like children’s plush toys than any other species.  They’re still found in abundance on Rottnest Island near Perth, which got its name (Dutch for "rat nest") from a 17th century explorer mistaking these fuzzy marsupials for large rats.

Of course, quokkas are much more closely related to the kangaroo.  Like everything else in Australia.  If Russell Crowe someday slugs a guy in a bar and then bounds away on two giant feet, don’t be too surprised.

Meet Australia’s increasingly vulnerable quokka, courtesy my Trebekistan pal Dara (who in turn I think cribbed this guy from Cute Overload):

I’ve seen quokkas in Aussie zoos several times, but their natural range (the southwest bit of Western Australia) and mine have yet to overlap in the wild.  Quokkas may look more like children’s plush toys than any other species.  They’re still found in abundance on Rottnest Island near Perth, which got its name (Dutch for "rat nest") from a 17th century explorer mistaking these fuzzy marsupials for large rats.

Of course, quokkas are much more closely related to the kangaroo.  Like everything else in Australia.  If Russell Crowe someday slugs a guy in a bar and then bounds away on two giant feet, don’t be too surprised.

The Nutshell restaurant, that is.

I’m about to head up to Vancouver shortly for a brief visit, and thinking of the Pacific Northwest reminded me that I want to plug one of the coolest and most unique restaurants I’ve been lucky enough to eat in, visited a few months ago on a swing through Portland.

Check out the lunch and dinner menus, seriously.  Tunisian brik, Nigerian akras… I had no idea what any of it was, really, but it was marvelous.

If you live in Portland, visit Portland, or can spell Portland, eat Nutshell.  That is all.

Woke up this morning to find myself (in round-shouldered cartoon form, anyway) suddenly on the front page of Salon.com, thanks to the mad genius of Scott Bateman:

(UPDATED: apologies for some weird error that made the animation work fine in every browser except Safari. Fixed. And here’s a permalink to the cartoon itself.)

If you like the cartoon, I hope you’ll enjoy the book.

(Say, my griping about ad-driven media has just been revealed as mid-range hypocrisy.  Still, it won’t be full-on until you see this site running ads from, I dunno, TexacoBurgerKing or whatever, and then running pieces about how the new PetroGriller With Cheese is both yummy and non-toxic.  Then the hypocrisy will be complete.)