GLOBADOM

All three new free daily papers are out now. It’s time to give a rough overview of each, and we’ll do it in order of appearance:

metro
The oldest, and the most straightforward. It’s a short daily paper, running 16 pages in a slightly oversized tabloid format. The articles are pretty brief, but the worst excesses of contentlessness have been excised. The crossword is small, but not awful. I can give metro my highest praise: you would probably be better informed after reading it.

24 hours
When good paper happens to bad news, it looks like this. 24 hours features a nice semi-gloss newsprint, whiter and with far better colour and photo reproduction than the other two papers. It’s the same grade as used by colour tabloid magazines like the National Enquirer. Its letter-sized 16-page format even has a glued binding, making it more of a daily magazine than a daily paper. No surprise that the parent company is a paper-maker.

I’m not sure what the causal relationship is, but the smallest and prettiest of the dailies is also the emptiest: a full-colour photo is most of the front page most days, movie starlet photos and articles take up page two, and then the news starts on page 3. To their credit, the cover story is a reasonable local one: wildlife officials have a suspect in the slaughter of 50 eagles, and the two other hot local stories (local MP in trouble over asking people for conduct bonds for visitor visas; baby shot in Maple Ridge) get their space too, though the stories are very brief.

And that’s it. 24 hours contains heavy dollops of entertainment news, which seems to have driven most of the other potential content out. If you’re looking for a cheaper, more timely substitute for In Touch Weekly, you’re sorted. Also, good crossword. Otherwise, this paper makes you stupider for the reading of it.

Dose
I see potential in Dose, but only that. It’s the newest and most confused so far. It’s the most direct about its marketing aims, which are to make late teens and early twentysomethings read a paper, preferably theirs.

I couldn’t actually find any local hard news in today’s issue. That’s weird. What is left is some breezy but reasonably sensible treatment of more national and international stories (the front-page splash is a comic-book graphic of Paul Martin sweating, with text referencing the Gomery inquiry), and its entertainment pages include an interesting page of tidbits about the film Sin City.

Graphically, the paper is a bit of a wreck. Reasonable design is let down by bad paper and overambitious uses of colour. This is the only paper with any non-colour pages. I would be interested in seeing this paper’s design merged with the technical advantages of 24 hours.

I’m not impressed with Dose so far, but I give them a chance. This is the paper most like reading the National Post’s better weekend sections. That’s not awful. But what is awful is the crossword. It’s tiny and clumsily clued, yet too filled with cryptic pop-culture references (which, for me, means indie music) for me to even finish it. Let’s give this paper an “N” for “Needs Improvement.” In my grade-school days, that was the worst possible grade on the cryptic VG/I/N scale. Maybe I’m just not in the demographic.

***
A note on the capitalisation conventions above: the papers hardly know themselves. I have picked the capitalisation chosen for each paper’s masthead for this posting, even though metro seems to regularly refer to the brand as “Metro” on the website and in bylines. 24 hours seems more consistent about these things, wandering into “24 Hours” only on a few parts of the web page. Dose is the least confused, except for its mildly ambiguous masthead typestyling, which could be pedantically read as “DOSe.”

Not much to say about the Pacific International Auto Show: if you like cars, they’ve got ’em!

This event takes place in BC Place Stadium, and runs until April 10. There’s a PDF-format show guide on their site, and don’t forget to enter the online contest to win a Dodge Viper, surely one of the finest door prizes ever.

Pacific International Auto Show
Open until 10pm every day through Saturday, April 10, 2005.
BC Place Stadium.
Tickets: $12 for adults, slightly cheaper for students, seniors, and families.

Okay, not the most exciting activity, but Vancouver is going from zero to three daily papers in two months. All will be “commuter” papers, or lite and easy reads.

The first paper out the gate was the Metro, on the streets now for a couple of weeks. Today 24 hours joins it, and Dose arrives next Monday.

In terms of size, the Metro clocks in at 16 pages, and 24 hours, appropriately enough, is a 24-page. All will be tabloids.

Half the fun of these papers is tracing the network of ownership. The Metro exists all over the world, but the local franchise is owned by the Toronto Star and Van Net, a division of CanWest Global. 24 hours is a product of the Sun Media group, aka Quebecor. And Dose? that’s also part of the Global media empire. But then, Global already has two daily newspapers in competition in the Vancouver market, so why not add two more?

The spread of these free daily papers, in particular ones by parent corporations with regular dailies, seems to have started with Chicago’s Red papers in 2002. Aside from providing more holes for their ad departments to sell, these papers are aimed at being gateway rags, an attempt to stanch the circulation bleeding from newspapers everywhere. Whether the readers these papers attract will take up the habit of newspaper subscription is the $64 question.

Full credit to the Asper media conglomerate, as they had an article that pointed me to a new thing to do. The Vancouver Museum is running a blossom-watching tour.

It sounds quite serene: a 2.5 hour bus tour of trees in bloom, including a stop at the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden for tea.

It’s expensive, but I give it my highest endorsement: the Lovely One and I are going.

Vancouver Museum Blossom Tour
Sundays, March 27, April 3, April 17, 10:00am-12:30pm
$35 per person
Tours start at the Vancouver Museum, 1100 Chestnut Street.
Phone 604 734-7368 for reservations.

All bike racers are mental.

Saturday: I crash just after the first lap, thanks to a really boring instance of pack stupidity. Casualties: hole in shorts, wheels de-trued, minor scrapes all over. Suck level 9.

Sunday: I finish truing the wheels. On the first lap of a hilly, windy race, I get dropped off a group of five lead riders. On the upside, nobody else stayed with them either, so I’m alone in sixth. One rider from the front group came back to me, and a teammate caught up. Along with a rider one lap down, we rode home together. I showed some strength in the final climb, and managed to take fifth. I’ll get to be on the website! Suck level 3.

I love the Spring Series.

I promise, TtdiV won’t be all restaurant reviews, but I wanted in this case to call out a very specific experience you can have at Tojo’s, a restaurant routinely described as the best sushi joint in a city with a reputation for good sushi joints: Omakase.

Here’s how it goes: you sit at the sushi bar, and the chef (Tojo himself in our case, and possibly in all cases) briefly quizzes you about your food preferences, and then brings out dishes until you ask him to stop. You will eat rolls you have not imagined, and Tojo himself is a jovial presence.

The Lovely One and I did this just once, some years ago, on a special occasion. The experience was a sublime education in what sushi could taste like.

Did I mention the price? It’s almost a shame to do so. In our case, a few years ago, the bill came to $180 before tip, and we didn’t drink anything. Was it worth it? I didn’t feel overcharged.

Tojo’s Restaurant
777 W. Broadway
Phone 604 872 8050
Open for dinner Monday-Saturday

The restaurant’s about page is funny and accurate.

The Storyeum. Okay, I know I wrote about it before, and not even in very flattering terms. But it’s a thing to do, and it is interesting.

What is the Storyeum? In short, a rather complicated multi-set stage show you walk through. The story covers the history of BC. Send your kids, send your visitors. Check the website, as they are closing in mid-April, but they have extended hours for Spring Break.

The Storyeum. See the site for the details of its Gastown location.

Welcome to the series. Today’s entry has a special place in my heart, and mostly just bores The Lovely One. Oh well. But it’s awesome.

The Trev Deeley Motorcycle Collection is the best Vancouver museum you’ve never heard of. It’s in the middle of Richmond, and it’s free, but you have to book the day off because it’s only open weekdays from 10-4.

Do it. If you have the least amount of gearheadedness, you will love it. The Harleys in the collection are special and plentiful, as you would expect from the collection of the late Trev Deeley, Harley-Davidson dealership owner and former board member of the Motor Company. But all marques are well-represented, and the collection as a whole is world-class. It includes one of the very few Hesketh motorcycles ever made, and oddities like two different rotary-powered motorcycles: a Suzuki RE-5 and a Hercules.

Trev Deeley Motorcycle Collection
13500 Verdun Place, Richmond, BC, Canada
Phone: (604) 273-5421
http://www.trevdeeley.com/custom/collection.html

And as usual, I blew it all on cycling. And what a fine thing to do! Saturday was a slow training ride, which meant riding to UBC and back. Sunday, I went out to the latest lovely Spring Series race, and by virtue of retreating back to the C group, I didn’t get dropped. On the standard bike racer scale, it was Suck Level 4, which meant in this case taking 7th place after missing the last-lap break and getting chased down by my older, smarter teammate. Oh good: here’s a picture of that glorious moment.

This week, the plan is to do the training. Next weekend? More racing, less Suck!

Special Bonus: without further ado, the “What to do In Vancouver” series is starting. No, this doesn’t mean I have enough entries. It just means I’m tired of waiting.

OLN Canada has long been a morass of bull riding and trout fishing (fine things, I’m sure, but not of much interest to me), plus three weeks of Tour de France coverage. For cyclists, the galling thing was that the US version of this channel has had much more cycling coverage than that. In past years they have done Tour-grade shows for both the Vuelta Espana and the Giro Italia, plus a great number of the major one-day races.

This year OLN Canada has decided to add a bunch of cycling to its schedule, hoorah! Sunday evenings are now targeted for cycling coverage. Here’s the schedule (listed times EST?):

Paris Nice Classic (Part 2) – March 13th @ 7:30pm
San Remo / Tirreno-Adriatico Classic – March 20th @ 7:30pm
Criterium International Classic – March 27th @ 7:30pm
Tour of Flanders Classic – April 3 @ 7:00pm … repeating at midnight
Paris Robaix/Redlands Classics – April 10th @ 5pm ….repeating at midnight
Amstel Gold Classic – April 17th @ 7:30pm…repeating at midnight
Bastogne Liege/ Sea Otter Classics – April 24th @ 7:30pm …repeating at
midnight
Tour of Georgia Classic – May 1st @ 7:30pm …repeating at midnight
Giro D’Italia (Day 1) – May 8th @ 7pm…repeating at midnight
Giro D’Italia (Day 2) – May 15th @ 7pm…repeating at 1am
Giro D’Italia (Day 3) – May 22 @ 7pm…repeating at midnight
Giro D’Italia (Day 4) – May 29th @ 7pm…repeating at midnight

They already had part one of the Paris-Nice last weekend, and I saw a bit of it, but it didn’t appear on my StarChoice programming guide. Same seems to be true of Sunday night’s programming, so if your TV guide doesn’t show it, take heart and tune in anyways.

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