Supposedly sales were down everywhere this holiday season; however, I did not see any evidence of this myself in Medicine hat. I made the stupid mistake of going to get a few items from Superstore on the day before Christmas Eve… how stupid of me. There was literally no parking spots, I should of taken that as a warning. You know how you often wonder why there is such large parking lots outside of stores when they are normally only half full at maximum anyways? Apparently they are just for the few days before and after Christmas. I entered the mosh-pit-like environment as soon as I stepped through the doors. This place was packed and the line ups were half way down the aisles themselves. This wasn’t an isolated incident either, supposedly the malls were packed and Walmart… well I won’t even begin to imagine what that place would be like. Supposedly this situation doubled itself on Boxing Day where shoppers were reported to have spent 10 hours waiting overnight in line outside Visions to get a new TV in one case.
Imagery via blogtalkradio.com
I did notice the sales though, Boxing Day is no longer a day, and now not even a week, in some cases in a few weeks or full month of sales. And normally the deals aren’t that great either, but this year 75%-90% off signs were littered everywhere. And these sales even started before Boxing Day, they started weeks before Christmas in some cases. For example, the Medicine Hat Mall had two Moonlight Madness events this year. Obviously this is a marketing tactic to get people to buy at Christmas in the wake of the Canadian recession. I think it probably worked on some level locally in Medicine Hat, but I think overall, we are a little too dramatic about the recession thing in Medicine Hat and other smaller towns. I cant wager a guess at what will happen next year though, depending how much deeper we have dug ourselves. Business’s have been reporting that they did just as well last year in terms sales (on Boxing Day), and maybe even better.
Ken Gousseau, Medicine Hat News Reporter, has reported about this here.
You heard right, tomorrow night (December 23, 2008) lasting from 9:00pm to 2:00am there will be a Christmas dance party of the indie-pop persuasion at The Silver Buckle. There will be a $5 cover charge and it will be DJ Bones’ first time DJing in Medicine Hat. The cool part is he will be taking requests all night as well he will be taking pre-requests via the Facebook Event board.
Christmas Indie Pop Dance Part at The Silver Buckle featuring Bones
The Silver Buckle
687 South Railway Street SE
Medicine Hat, AB
Featuring some tunes by the following bands/groups:
“The Strokes, Bloc Party, The Pixies, Franz Ferdinand, Of Montreal, The Stone Roses, Spoon, Rich Aucoin, The Unicorns, The Virgins, Boats, The Cure, The Pipettes, Metric, Two Hours Traffic, Komeda, Vampire Weekend, Mark Ronson, Spiral Beach, LCD Soundsystem, Modest Mouse, Wolf Parade, The Hidden Cameras, Belle and Sebastian, The Rapture, The Postal Service, The Shins, MGMT, Cut Copy, Black Kids, Sleepless Nights, Chromeo, Justice and way more…”
So basically half my iTunes collection. Too bad some of us have to work still! Also not to mention I hate the scene, haha. All photos/posters have been supplied by the Facebook Event.
DJ Bones -Photo by Mary-Jane Doucette
The Ricky, Julian and Bubbles Community Service Variety Show will premiere in Medicine Hat at 8:00PM on Friday, January 9, 2009 at the Esplanade. This is their last performance before the trailer park closes down for good.
Tickets are $40 and can be purchased at www.tixx.ca or can be charged by phone at 1-403-503-8777.
The Medicine Hat Mall is having another Moonlight Madness tonight starting at 6:00PM and lasting until 11:00PM. It seems like there is a lot more sales this time, not only that, but also the quality of the sales seem a lot better too… or atleast I think so. Continue reading to see the complete list of savings and deals that will be switching off and on every 15 minutes over the five hour period. There is also some night-wide deals going on as well located at the bottom of the list. The list has been provided by the Medicine Hat Mall insert posted inside today’s edition of the Medicine Hat News.
In the Discovery Channel finale of Canada’s Worst Driver, Ashley Van Ham was given the title of “Canada’s Worst Driver”
Many people seem to dig this show, but honestly, you wonder how someone can be so ignorant as they appear in the show. From a young age, kids grow up seeing their parents or guardians driving. It does not take a genius to realize that the gas pedal accelerates, the brake decelerates, and you turn the wheel at which ever direction you want to go. Combine that with traffic lights, and obviously again, as we are conditioned to think from a young age that green means go, red means stop, amber (or yellow) can only be between the two, and mean proceed with caution. Signs like stop signs are clearly labeled “STOP”, while other signs can easily be determined with even the lowest of I.Q.’s.
Image Courtesy of DiscoveryChannel.ca
Ashley Van Ham was quoted saying: “It was a great experience overall, and I use the skills I learned every day,” but who really needs to go on a public show and prove their ignorance just to learn something not only learned since a young age and while growing up, but should also learn in Drivers Education class?
This show is parallel in many ways to the show Canada’s Worst Handyman. The difference is that building something takes some form of logical thinking, and not everyone is conditioned with the thought process of how to build things from a young age. But still, you need a good foundation and appropriate support to hold up a roof.
Back to Ashley Van Ham and bad driving habits. If you are overly distracted, aggressive, and unskilled to the point of not learning the skills, then get off the road. As if the ice was not bad enough, or the bumper-to-bumper action going down Dunmore road or any of the bigger hill roads in Medicine Hat, now the news and television perpetuates the fear of Canada’s Worst Driver cruising around the streets.
Medicine Hat has been hit, as we all know, with a belated snowfall. What is more, it rained prior to the snow, making the roads all the more slippery. Lack of traction is not entirely the culprit for accidents; it rests mostly on the drivers who do not give themselves enough time to properly brake on the winter-coated streets.
Following the actual speed limits in winter and pre-braking are the easiest way to avoid accidents, but also down shifting helps quite a lot. When I come down the Dunmore Road hill ever morning for work, I ride the clutch in first year and barely brake at all, because it is just that effective and easy.
Coming home from work on Tuesday, I noticed a car beside me on Dunmore Road following too closely to a van in front of her. Naturally the light turned yellow, the van stomped on the brake and the girl slid into him. Even with no one in front of me, I still down shifted a good way prior to the intersection because I did not want any 180 degree spins going on. And when people might think their car is too light to maintain such traction, keep in mind that I drive a light little Neon that has all-year-round tires, not winter tires. It weighs nothing (in comparison to most other other vehicles), and takes a while sometimes to get going on an icy street, especially in icy hills, but I have never been in an accident and never have gotten stuck, even in deep Saskatchewan snow falls.
If you are in the right lane on a two lane street, the best thing you can do if you are sliding or having trouble slowing down is to grind against the curb on the side of the road, or even a boulevard, not randomly crank the wheel one way or the other, which initiates a spin. Grinding or hitting the curb is a better alternative to hitting someone in front of you by far. That way, since it would be your fault for not giving enough brake time, you would have to pay for their damages, your damages, and your insurance rates would increase from being in an accident that you are at fault for, and most often, hitting the curb will not damage your car much at all, if at all.
Drive safe.
Starting December 16, 2008, at the Esplanade Arts & Heritage Centre, begins Whole Being, the biannual faculty exhibition from the staff of the Medicine Hat College Visual Communications program. The program of which is founded from the collaboration between fine art and design. The staff consists of a world-wide variety of skilled artisans, all specialized in their own way. Whole Being includes the professionals, Laara Cassells, Craig Cote, Deborah Forbes, Mato Higashitani, Rory Mahony, Micheal McClary, Poul Nielsen, Dean Smale, Yulin Wang, Giles Woodward, and Nelson Yuen. Poul Nielsen has also recently been a featured artist here at Medicine Hat Media; he specializes in drawing and painting. With all types of media combined, the show is surely to strike at all the senses, as well as instill deep thought about how we relate to the world in which we live.
Whole Being Handout
The reception begins Thursday, January 22, 8PM, and is also free admission. The show ends February 1, 2009, making it the grand show to carry the Esplanade into the 2009 New Year. Here is the summary statement presented to you by the Esplanade:
“Artists and designers from the faculty of the Visual Communications Program at Medicine Hat College show exciting new works in all media which embrace art as a way of making sense (by every means) of the existing world and our place in it.”
Not only one, but two deer were euthanized or put down recently. The two deer, one of which was the mother and the other, the mother’s “injured” fawn. The fawn and a sibling have been seen hanging around outside the Riverview Care Centre for a couple weeks. The mother supposedly had a “badly-injured” leg, while the fawn was missing half of his leg with part of the bone protruding. It might sound like they were in bad shape; however, I have personally seen at least one of them, dating back to about a year ago (the pictures are below to prove it). The ultimate reason brought forth by Sustainable Resource and Development spokesperson Darcry Whiteside was that it was their policy to put down animals in distress and also noting human safety concerns. They were originally phoned in to the Fish and Game Conservation by a women looking to get treatment/help for the injured deer. The Fish and Game Conservation later put down both of the two deer in question on separate dates.
Here are the photos I took on December 24th, 2007. This may or may not be the mother in question; however, the fawn (shown younger in these pictures) is clearly the one in question. These pictures were taken at the Medicine Hat College.
Possibly the mother deer in question
Fawn missing half of its leg
Close up of the fawn's injury
This is pretty much bulls**t – I mean, they were not in distress, they weren’t actually sick, they were just previously injured. I seen them almost a year ago, and they were still alive (until yesterday) – they must have been doing pretty fine. A matter of human safety? Ya right, healthy deer that run in front of traffic, now that’s a matter of human safety, these two deer would never try to run anywhere, because they couldn’t. I’m not a huge animal activist or a practicing vegetarian but you don’t have to be to realize this kind of stuff is just wrong. They were a nuisance and an eye sore to some and instead of moving them to another location they were killed off, in my mind, injustly.
On Saturday, December 6, 2008, we attended the presentation of The Big “D”.
As was discussed in a previous article, The Big “D” was a performance/play about being big “D” Deaf. The play was about Patti Spicer and her life growing up and all the difficulties she overcame. During the nearly two hour performance, Patti Spicer interpreted many ordeals from her life, including a trip to Italy and getting separated from her party, the inability to speak with her hands to paramedics when she was involved in an accident, shunning from classmates during university, and more.
The play opened with a display of many labels that people with disabilities might come across, including “Odd”, “Broken”, “Weird”, etc. These labels are later ‘wiped away’ by the actors near the conclusion of the play, after the audience comes to realize that people that are deaf can do anything a hearing person can, they just cannot hear.
During the performance, the audience was enlightned with watching Patti Spicer, as well as other actors, communicate through sign language, which was then interpreted vocally. Singing and dancing were also part of the event, as well as, and most important of all, insight into another persons lifestyle and experiences.
There’s a lot going on tonight apparently. If you’re not already going to The Big “D” or Lord of the Dance then you also can choose to enjoy a little reggea/alternative rock as supplied by Once Just, a band coming out of Calgary. Their sound is kind of like a mix between Korn and Skindred.
Once Just Poster
The Ottoman Lounge
502 South Railway St. Se
Medicine Hat, AB
Saturday, December 6th, 2008
9:00pm – 1:00AM
Tickets: $5
“Listen Up” – Once Just
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