Twilight: New Moon filming in New Westminster. Photo:VancityAllie.com

Yes, New Westminster’s Twi-Hard historians may have a renaissance this spring and summer. When the New Moon DVD is released tomorrow, the Queensborough Wal-Mart will be one of dozens of stores in the chain bracing for a rush of Twilight fans at a special midnight opening. With several key scenes filmed right here in New Westminster, maybe Archie Miller should start a Twi-Hard walking tour to share this most important historical legacy with future generations.

The Paramount Theatre (transformed into a cinema for the Bella/Jacob date scene) and other parts of Columbia, Front St. (including the parkade) and 61 Duncan St. were among the New Westminster locations used in the movies, netting about $10k for city coffers, according to the city’s Jason Haight in an email to me earlier today:

The permit fees for this filming were $10,503.15. This value does not include the economic spin off related to Twilight filming in New Westminster (i.e. goods or services purchased while filming or wages paid to staff who reside in the community, and in turn, further stimulate the local economy).

On an annual basis filming permit revenues equal between ½ to 1% reduction in property taxes. Again this value does not consider the non-permit economic multiplier effect in hosting filming in New Westminster. A past BC Film Commission study estimated that the economic spin off of filming in New Westminster was $8M and is approximately $1.2B in British Columbia, of which, 96% is spent in Metro Vancouver.

Another example of the economic benefits related to filming includes the 2009 Filming of Diary of a Wimpy Kid in New Westminster. Permit fees, location fees and community gifts exceeded $150k plus the associate economic spin off related to the production company purchasing good or services from New Westminster merchants or residents. This feature film, I believe, has just been released and has received positive critical reviews. Seeing our beautiful City on the big screen brings a sense of pride to our community.

So even if you aren’t interested in the brouhaha over ‘Team Edward’ vs. ‘Team Jacob’ you can thank Twilight and other New West-filmed shows for offsetting at least a little of our property taxes, and lending a touch of the silver screen’s lustre to the Royal City.

And, coming this summer, there’ll be even more vampy New West action on screen in the third installment when Eclipse is released in theatres…

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Council passed a motion on Monday that represents an improvement (from an environmental sustainability and solid-waste-diversion perspective) over the recommendation from staff presented to the Environmental Advisory Committee last week.

I paraphrase slightly, but Council requested that the 120L bin be the default size for mixed waste and that 240L be the default size for Clean Green waste (this is the staff recommendation), but then they put a cherry on top by suggesting that the administrative fee for size switches be waived if one is switching to a smaller bin, and that the annual charge for choosing the larger bin be indexed to tippage fees: the more the City pays to dump your trash, the more you pay for having a large bin.

Kudos to Council for taking these progressive measures. Extra Kudos to Councillor McIntosh for proposing (and Councillors McEvoy and Cote for supporting) a 120L option for Clean Green Bins. Hopefully, staff will find a way before the roll-out of the Clean Green bins to come back with a proposal to offer this 120L option, as it seems appropriate for us backyard composters and those with smaller lots.

The New Westminster Environmental Partners will stay involved in this process. Hopefully, Council and Staff will take the NWEP up on our offer to help with the education part of the Clean Green bin roll-out. We also have some great ideas on how to work on waste reduction at New Westminster’s numerous multi-family dwellings. More exciting news surrounds New Westminster’s first Neighbourhood Zero Waste Challenge, taking place on a block of Colborne Street.

For info on all or any of these, or if you have ideas or opinions about garbage, or any other aspect of New Westminster’s environment, check out the NWEP website.

Now I have to finish tearing up my front yard and get some carrots in the ground…

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The grocery aisle at Wal-Mart. Photo: ratterrell (via Flickr)

Wal-Mart has applied to open a new grocery supercentre in its Queensborough store. Thrifty Foods has just been announced as an anchor tenant in Sapperton’s coming Brewery District mixed-retail/residential complex next to SkyTrain and Royal Columbian Hospital. A new Safeway is coming to the Plaza 88 development at New Westminster SkyTrain. And of course, the River Market will open this summer as a newly food-focused destination with an as-yet-unnamed anchor grocer.

Meanwhile, Save-On just opened last summer up at Sixth & Sixth near the established Safeway in Royal City Centre, and IGA continues to draw Quayside & Downtown shoppers in Columbia Square. Then there’s the Safeway on McBride, big-box stores like PriceSmart, Choices and Superstore in neighbouring Burnaby and Coquitlam, a plethora of small local mom ‘n pop produce shops, specialty bakeries and butchers, and the Royal City Farmers Market.

How many grocery choices does a small city need? New Westminster has gone for so long with only a few megastores, and now suddenly we’re being inundated with them.

Perhaps there’s something we don’t know. I’d love to see the market research behind the decisions to locate new stores here. Big chains like Wal-Mart, Save-On and Thrifty Foods don’t open new locations on a whim.

My hunch: this is one more indication that the pace of change is about to accelerate in this city. Those new condo towers are finally ready to be filled with empty nesters and young professionals priced out of downtown, and the big box stores know it. New West is about to get a lot livelier.

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But back to the question. My pat answer to, “Where do you find the time,” is that we don’t have cable television. As Seth Godin said in his post today about why he doesn’t watch (any!) TV: “there are so many other things on the buffet that I prefer.”

Really, it’s all about priorities. If you don’t think you have the time for something you value, then you need to take a step back and re-evaluate how you’re spending the time you have. Before cutting our cable, I often felt like television just wasn’t good enough to warrant the time I spent on it. But still I watched out of habit.

Television sedates the restlessness I feel inside that motivates me to act on my dreams. When we cut our cable, it freed me to make better use of my time. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I blog. These days, I often spend my nights trying to soothe one or both children to sleep. And now and then we do watch a movie or a TV show via DVD or streaming video on the computer. But when we do it’s a clear choice, not just a lazy default.

Godin links to a 2008 speech from Clay Shirky about an idea he calls the “cognitive surplus.”

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

Shirky points out that redirecting even 1% of the time most of us squander on bad TV could power 100 Wikipedia-sized projects a year.

Here’s the question I’d like you to ponder: what could you do in your community if you took 10% of the time you now spend watching TV and put it towards accomplishing the changes you wish to see? Pretty much anything you could do would be more likely to build relationships with others in our community than losing another hour of your life to a show you don’t even like all that much.

Here are some ideas:

• Write a guest post for a blog
• Start your own blog
• Volunteer with a community organization
• Start a new community event
• Start or improve your own business
• Start a vegetable garden in your yard
• Join or start a community garden
• Offer to help a neighbour
• Pick up garbage in your neighbourhood
• Take a walk
• Learn a new skill
• Improve your home
• Go to a community event
• Have your neighbours over for dinner
• Organize a games night
• Go to the gym
• Cook a really good meal
• Write your financial plan
• Read a book
• Take up a hobby

Etc., etc. There is so much in this world to experience. Instead of escaping into sitcoms and soap operas about life in New York, Chicago, LA or other places far away, carve out a little time for the life you live here.

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DPAC has consistently and aggressively  pushed council, school board and even the B.C. Ministry of Education for resolution on one of our city’s thorniest problems: the building of the new High School and the linked construction of new and replacement schools in New Westminster. While gathering the concerns and opinions of parents in the school district can be a powerful measure of support and a reliable way to indicate a direction for our city’s decision makers, the survey recently released by DPAC falls short of a credible scientific standard and risks being dismissed as a partisan cudgel. Leading questions and clear examples of author bias make the DPAC’s survey effort just short of push polling.

Instead of asking  to rate the standard “job performance” or their “overall” satisfaction of Parent Advisory Councils, School Board, City Council, Provincial Government, participants are asked to rate how these groups “listen to their concerns.”  What percentage of residents have issued their concerns directly? Concerns raised include a variety of opinions. How does this question account for that?

Even more concerning was an almost impossible question: How satisfied are you with:

The city, provincal(sic) and federal governments for not stepping up to the plate and holding themselves accountable for building on top of a cemetery as well

Phrased this way, the question abruptly turns a survey of opinions into what feels like a weapon in a vendetta against the various governing groups responsible for our schools. It oversimplifies a complex issue. When leading questions are introduced like this, what value can the results have?

I am torn writing this post because I don’t want to vilify DPAC. It is possible that their passion for the children of SD40 and frustration with the ongoing delay in school construction has just seeped into the survey. And I do think that DPAC should be pressuring the school board and provincial Ministry of Education to step up and own their responsibility to the students of this district. While a survey can be an effective tool; this one unfortunately, may be hard to take seriously.

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The New Westminster Environmental Partners have been talking a lot of trash this year, as solid waste and it’s reduction, is one of our key initiatives for 2010. Trash is timely right now, with all the recent talk of Cache Creek Landfill limits, waste-to-energy plants, and Metro Vancouver’s Zero Waste Challenge.

Right here in New Westminster, the City is preparing to roll out its automated trash collection system. With the trucks on order, and the crews ready, the City is now about to make the one decision that will likely have the biggest impact on waste reduction goals in the City over the next 15-20 years: what size of bins to buy?

There is lots of info over at the NWEP website about what the City does now, what some other Cities have done, and where the New West is going. However, that hastily gathered info is already out of date. At Wednesday’s Environmental Advisory Committee meeting, City staff introduced the report that will be going to council on Monday, and it shows that Staff recognize that we don’t need bigger bins than we have now, and that moving to larger bins does not reflect our commitments to waste reduction. This is a good sign; and let’s hope Council is on the same page as Staff about this.

The NWEP still have some concerns about the plan. For example, the 240L Green Waste bins seem ridiculously large for anyone who composts in their back yard. Apparently, this report is going to council on Monday, and some NWEP members will be going as well to speak to several waste reduction issues. Stay tuned!

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Paul McCann, Patron Master of the newly opened Blood & Iron school of Western Martial Arts in New Westminster (photo: Bloodandiron.ca)

They say that those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But for some folks, the past isn’t just for remembering. It’s for re-enacting.

It’s well-known that New Westminster has a deep love for the historical. As one of the oldest settlements in B.C., we are reminded of times past in the brick storefronts on Columbia St., the names of our boulevards and avenues, and even in the surprise discoveries of forgotten cemeteries. And there are a number of organizations who go beyond talking about history, and actually live it.

New Westminster is regularly visited by James Douglas and other key historical figures courtesy of the Royal Engineers re-enactors. Our mayor has even taken Douglas to task over giving away our status as B.C.’s capital to Victoria.

There’s also a local chapter for the Society of Creative Anachronism, which will be hosting an event for newbies in New Westminster on March 20 at the Masonic Hall at 508 Agnes St., where the historically-minded can learn medieval skills like armor-smithing, rapier technicque, Italian dancing, and the Bardic Arts.

And for those of a warlike persuasion, you can learn both archery and swordplay right here in New West. On East Columbia St. in Sapperton, Boorman Archery can outfit you with bow and quiver and direct you to local contests of skill (though you may first want to practice a bit in their archery range or sign up for their archery lessons). Meanwhile, over on Front St., Blood and Iron, an ‘Academy of Western Martial Arts,’ has just opened, where you can learn the art of swordsmanship.

Whether or not you’re the type to dress up in old-tyme gear or pick up bow and spear, you can surely enjoy the spectacle. It’s great to see groups like these breathing life into our history and reminding us of the good (and bad) of the ways of the past.

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To be fair, our family was among those. Earth Hour wasn’t really on our radar, and we didn’t really think about it until it was over. Later on, I regretted it.

I have come to believe in the power of small change. By itself, Earth Hour solves none of the problems associated with climate change. But it presents an opportunity to take time out from the thoughtless consumption that marks so many of our evenings: watching TV, surfing the Internet, or whatever the usual pattern is.

So take Earth Hour and use the hour of quiet to have a candlelight snuggle with your sweetheart, do some quiet meditation, break out the acoustic guitar or go to sleep decadently early.

New West power consumption dropped only 0.1% in 2009’s event, compared to 1.4% in 2008. This year, the City of New West is again calling for participation in the event. Here’s hoping we step up to the plate in 2010.

Earth Hour is from 8:30-9:30pm on March 27, 2010.

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Quantum Deli & Bistro, at 41 Sixth St. in New Westminster

Quantum offers a killer cup of coffee, gorgeous decor, free wifi and a touch of the exotic with its homey paninis and soups. Look for unusual fare like za’atar alongside the egg salad sandwiches, and ma’amoul (date-stuffed sugarless cookies … oh so yummy) next to the shortbread.

Every table is set with a small, modern arrangement from Queen’s Park Florist. The menus are displayed on digital screens. Quantum is probably one of the only New Westminster eateries to be written up in an interior design magazine (Or so the owner mentioned last time we were in. I didn’t catch the name of the publication, unfortunately).

I maintain that ordering decaf is the best way to tell if a restaurant’s coffee is up to snuff. Decaffeinated coffee is almost always terrible, and only quality beans make it worth drinking. Quantum serves 49th Parallel coffee, which my coffee snob friends tell me is the good stuff (not like my taste buds couldn’t tell).

Quantum also sells sliced deli meats, cheese, olives, roasted red peppers and dolmades at or below grocery store prices.  They carry sandwich cheese favourites like Havarti and Edam, but there were also some I’d never heard of before. After sampling a few cheeses, we walked away with some mellow Kashkaval and salty Nabelsi. It’s worth noting that Quantum also provides meat & cheese party platters, also at grocery store prices (while offering far better quality food).

All in all, I’m very impressed, and I plan to be back.

Quantum Deli & Bistro is at 41 Sixth St. Next time you’re in the area, instead of waiting in line at the Starbucks on Columbia, duck around the corner and give Quantum a try instead.

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Inside Board Game Warriors, at 708 Clarkson St.

Board Game Warriors, at 708 Clarkson St., is a little gem of a store tucked under the SkyTrain tracks. It offers a large selection of games for teen and adult gamers, plus a few for younger gamers age five and up.  Like Settlers of Catan? It looks like they’ve got every expansion ever made (and most were in store). Ditto for Carcassonne. The selection in-store seemed to lean towards the quasi-historical strategy games, but it may be that we just noticed what we like! There’s a lot to see.

But the very best thing about Board Game Warriors? Open box gaming nights. Three nights a week, board game lovers are invited to come and geek out on hundreds of games you can play for free. Talk about an awesome free night out with friends. No reservations are needed, just drop by with your posse and choose something to play. Open gaming sessions are listed on Board Game Warriors’ website, and are currently Tuesday and Thursday from 5-9pm and Saturday noon-7pm.

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