A Magical and Mild Adventure in Valencia
An ancient city inside a new one beckons Jay Stone to the surprise-filled birthplace of paella
By Jay Stone
VALENCIA, Spain — We came here by chance, the way people used to travel when they were in their 20s and it was all about moving and a destination was just a name to drop, a place to rest on the road. We came in that spirit. We stayed for the paella. It was invented here, in this bustling city on the south coast of Spain (the Valencia orange was invented in California). It’s delicious too, although I’m not the one to ask. It was delicious everywhere. I like to think I have good taste in movies, but I don’t have any taste in taste. So, Valencia: magical, all the more so if you don’t expect anything except a place to stop 3½ hours from Barcelona because 3½ hours is about all you want to do. An old city surrounded by a new one: outside, there’s the famous City of Arts and Sciences — an IMAX theatre, an aquarium, a science museum, an arts complex all in ...
Can't anybody here hear this game?
Charley Gordon finds quiet the beauty of the moment amid the constant cacophony of mindless colour commentary
By Charley Gordon
Sports can be nice when nobody is talking. I had that realization a few weeks ago when I watched a professional golf tournament in Florida. My son and I had been given tickets. Not knowing exactly how these things worked, we walked through a gate, followed some people and suddenly were beside the third green, along with a handful of others. We saw some men walking up to the green and suddenly realized they were well-known golfers (whose names I now forget), along with their caddies. There was no spoken announcement of who they were, no shouts from the crowd. They walked, without fanfare, onto the green, where, I now noticed, two golf balls lay, and got ready to putt. It was mid-morning and the leaders of this tournament wouldn't tee off for a few hours, so the crowds were thin and a certain calmness prevailed. Part of the calmness was due to the absence ...
Can’t anybody here hear this game?
Charley Gordon finds quiet the beauty of the moment amid the constant cacophony of mindless colour commentary
By Charley Gordon
Sports can be nice when nobody is talking. I had that realization a few weeks ago when I watched a professional golf tournament in Florida. My son and I had been given tickets. Not knowing exactly how these things worked, we walked through a gate, followed some people and suddenly were beside the third green, along with a handful of others. We saw some men walking up to the green and suddenly realized they were well-known golfers (whose names I now forget), along with their caddies. There was no spoken announcement of who they were, no shouts from the crowd. They walked, without fanfare, onto the green, where, I now noticed, two golf balls lay, and got ready to putt. It was mid-morning and the leaders of this tournament wouldn't tee off for a few hours, so the crowds were thin and a certain calmness prevailed. Part of the calmness was due to the ...
Dispatches from Abroad: The Gentle Yens of Girona
Jay Stone explores an ancient Spanish city to discover a slow parade of humanity on cobble stone streets and the prosthetic digits of Edward Scissorhands
By Jay Stone
GIRONA, Spain -- There's a great lassitude that settles over Spain on a Sunday -- or perhaps, that settles over the visitor to Spain on a Sunday -- that is somehow ideal if you wash up in Girona. It's a medieval city just east of Barcelona whose historic district, all cobbled streets and narrow alleys, were built circa 1000. Little wrought iron balconies are set in the stone walls, and I saw an older couple sitting at a bistro table, having lunch together and each looking at their own cell phone. The stores aren't open, but the museums are free -- a mixed blessing -- and so you climb the steep steps behind the cathedral to the famous Jewish quarter, or El Call, one of the oldest in Europe. Once again, Jewish people have their historic roots on a hill all the better -- at least in this telling -- to come down ...
Disney boasts B.C. connection in Tomorrowland ads
George Clooney is on the B.C.-proud bus--literally. The movie star and pop culture icon will be featured prominently in new bus ads for Tomorrowland, the highly-anticiapted Walt Disney studios spectacle that started shooting in several different locations across eight different B.C. cities back in August 2013.
In the ads, Clooney's figure looks out at a shiny new world created entirely through special effects, but if you look at the contours of the mountains in the background, the profile of Cypress Mountain is unmistakable. "While it's certainly not unique for a film to be shot in B.C., this is the first time that the province has been recognized in ad creative for the important role it played in production," said Greg Mason, vice-president of marketing for Walt Disney Studios Canada. "We're proud that one of our biggest releases of the year was shot on Canadian soil and this was our way of conveying that pride and saluting the province and the members of the local film ...
Dispatches from Abroad: Dilly Dali-ing in Cadaques
Jay Stone ventures into the Spanish mountains to visit the very real birthplace of the seminal surrealist
By Jay Stone
CADAQUES, Spain -- This pretty-as-a-postcard town lies at the end of a long twisty road up and down a mountain a couple of hours southeast of Barcelona. You wouldn't get here by accident, but it's worth the drive: whitewashed buildings on gently rising hills, tucked around a small harbour with cafes and restaurants that crowd against tiny beaches. Everything is white and blue, cobbled and ancient. You could stay here forever. To get here, you pass through Figueres, where Salvador Dali was born and lived for a while, and home to a museum dedicated to his honour. Its thin curved corridors are lined with his bizarre constructions -- headless dolls, outlandish jewelry -- and even more bizarre tourists, who arrive in groups to press their noses against glass cases and to take photos of everything that doesn't move. Dali once said that the only difference between ...
Milk: The New Mushroom Cloud
Facing the white menace: Life was so much simpler when our biggest fear was nuclear Armageddon instead of the fat, systemic antibiotics and the now-intolerable lactose in once-benign moo-juice... and we didn't even mention the dairy board conspiracy
By Charley Gordon
If you truly want to know what’s dangerous in the world, you have to read the Style and Living section of the newspaper. The dangers in the rest of the paper are predictable. They haven’t changed in centuries — war, flood, earthquake, pestilence, terrorism and undercooked pork. But the other dangers are changing all the time, particularly the ones that attack you in your home and in unfashionable restaurants. Keeping track of them is a bit of a chore, but worth it. Otherwise, there are diseases and syndromes that would catch you unawares. Plus, there are new letters every day that follow LGBT and you don’t want to seem insensitive. *
If you want to know what’s hot now in the list of things to be wary ...
FORGET SPANDEX, IT’S SUIT TIME!
We thank the tailors for making these Age of Ultron superheroes look so dapper, but if we look back at the birth of the stretchy suit, we have to thank the tailor's son and a 'super fabric' called nylon LONDON -- Isn't it time superheroes dressed like men instead of Russian figure skaters from the '70s? We give full marks to the elegantly tailored Paul Bettany (above) and the ever-dashing Chris Evans for shaking it up at The Avengers: Age of Ultron premiere, but we also realize without all the flashy NASCAR paint, it's hard to figure out which guy in a suit stopped an evil artificial intelligence from taking over the universe. When Canada's own Joe Shuster created the whole, hyper-fitted look of the modern superhero with Superman's first appearance in Action Comics back in 1938, he not only offered up a protagonist with an identifiable brand and logo, he may have been inspired by the invention of a brand new, manmade fabric called nylon. The first entirely synthetic ...
FORGET SPANDEX, IT'S SUIT TIME!
We thank the tailors for making these Age of Ultron superheroes look so dapper, but if we look back at the birth of the stretchy suit, we have to thank the tailor's son and a 'super fabric' called nylon LONDON -- Isn't it time superheroes dressed like men instead of Russian figure skaters from the '70s? We give full marks to the elegantly tailored Paul Bettany (above) and the ever-dashing Chris Evans for shaking it up at The Avengers: Age of Ultron premiere, but we also realize without all the flashy NASCAR paint, it's hard to figure out which guy in a suit stopped an evil artificial intelligence from taking over the universe. When Canada's own Joe Shuster created the whole, hyper-fitted look of the modern superhero with Superman's first appearance in Action Comics back in 1938, he not only offered up a protagonist with an identifiable brand and logo, he may have been inspired by the invention of a brand new, manmade fabric called nylon. The first entirely synthetic fiber ever ...
Dispatches from Abroad: 4 Cats, one full stomach
Jay Stone fills up on Barcelona's rich culinary history, where 4 Cats on the menu isn't a PETA call to action, but the promise of tasty delights served on lampshades
By Jay Stone
BARCELONA, Spain -- The two big things to do here are to eat and to go to art galleries, and if you can eat where the painters used to hang out, it's a huge time-saver. This comes in very handy when siesta runs over its limit. And so we arrive at 4 Cats, a famous cafe on a little alley called Montsio, just off the big Portal de L'Angel, one of the city's main streets. 4 Cats is 118 years old, although it was closed now and then for civil wars, artistic revolutions and so on. Still, it's pretty legendary: a charming bistro with a coffee room in front, a tiled bar in the middle, and a big room in the back with apricot-coloured walls, rows of tables on the floor and a wooden mezzanine that fills up at every meal. It was opened in 1897 by four painters who were paying homage to Le Chat Noir cabaret in ...
