Britney Spears is behaving normally these days, and the paparazzi and other foot soldiers of the tabloid armies built up to fight wars over info scraps about dysfunctional celebrities couldn't be less happy.

I've been shaking my head at the IOC's decision to cave in to China on Internet censorship.

I've had two bikes stolen during my time in Toronto (I haven't given the thieves a chance at a third).

I went down to the warehouses on Strachan Ave. and Ordnance St. this evening, but that long shot didn't pay off. I didn't see either bike.

More to the point, I didn't see either stripped-down frame.

It's a very sad graveyard of stripped-down bikes in there. If you got a whole bike back, you're very lucky.

Police have been using the Igor Kenk saga (someone really should pick up his mail from the 927 Queen W. box; it's piling up) to push their registration program. I would note that one of the two was registered, and I gave detailed information (including serial number) about the other.

This made no apparent difference. I still never got the bikes back. One was taken in 2005, the other in 2006.

In some ways, I hope whoever stole them actually needed them to ride, not to strip down and sell the parts to buy crack or heroin. The thought of the bikes just decaying in some abandoned lot is a mental image I don't want in my head.

This is the scene today at Prospect Point in Vancouver's Stanley Park. Looks like an industrial clearcut, doesn't it? A ferocious windstorm buffeted the park in December 2006. Here's a January 2007 feature I wrote for CTV.ca: After the windstorm: Restoring Stanley Park.

While buying a salt-water fishing licence in the Charlottes, I made small talk with a woman who clearly wasn't a local. She spoke English with accent tinted by Parisian French.

Actually, it turns out she's from Lyon, France, has an art teaching background and was hoping to move to Kamloops and perhaps land a teaching gig.

She described her hometown as very snobby, then added, "But here, I am the snob."

My guess is that asking people in her current community what they think about a Claude Monet painting selling for $80 million wouldn't be as effective a conversation-starter as saying, "I just put a new sparkplug in my Husqvarna." :)

I'd like to know more about how urbanites would handle the transition to a very small community where everyone else is the same, and if you aren't like them, you might have your problems socially bonding with them (although I candidly admit the reverse could also apply). Part of the reason for leaving forestry behind is I didn't want to spend my life around people whose idea of a good time is driving a snowmobile through a fence (not that I didn't have my own yahoo moments in those days).

However, while she might not have many buddies to chat about art with, at least she could go for one of those coffees that mix steamed milk and espresso. What are they called again?

Ah yes! That's it! A laitte!

Wait a minute:

I suspect that would be more correct. :)

Finally, while at Tow Hill, I yakked with one local couple out with their kids. They were fishing off the rocks for halibut. The woman asked me, "Is Toronto elitist?"

Oh yes. :) I certainly wouldn't count myself among that rarified group, and certainly a wide swath of Torontonians would count as ordinary people, but it also has me wondering what an elitist is, and why it would be a pejorative in certain circles?

Does liking art, ideas or decent food make you a snob or an elitist? If so, I guess you'd have to mark me as one. Conversely, is it reverse snobbism to deride someone as "elitist" if they get art-house films and you don't? You tell me.

I rented a car in the Queen Charlottes (more on that here).

I had to pick it up from a home near the Skidegate ferry dock.

While there, a girl, whom I estimate to be about four years old, comes out. She walks over, pokes me in the sternum and asks, "Who made your shirt?"

"An artist lady," I said. "She tie-dyed it."

"Well it's messy," the kid said with remarkable bluntness. "It's a messy tie-dye."

Allow me to excuse myself for offending your already-well-developed fashion sense!

A week later, I drop off the car relatively late. The lady was nice enough to run me back to the motel.

We got to chatting about my little buddy. Apparently the kid never talked to any stranger for the longest time, but is now, er, overcompensating. :)

At a local hospital fundraiser, the kid went to some woman who was smoking and told her: "You shouldn't do that, you know. You're going to die."

While the mother wondered how to teach the lessons of socially appropriate interaction, my feeling was that perhaps she'll be an acerbic American Idol-style judge for her generation. But perhaps she's more Mr. Blackwell than Simon Cowell. :)

And if you're wondering, the physical resemblance of the fashion critic to this pop culture figure is striking: :)

The fashion critic is a cool kid, and her mom's a very nice person. I wish the two of them well.

While in Vancouver last week, almost every cab I saw was a hybrid.

Here are the rates for Yellow Cab in Vancouver:

• Flag (Includes first 1/13th KM) - $2.70
• Per Kilometer - $1.58

Here are the rates in Toronto:

• Pickup rate - $4
• Per kilometre - $1.62

That is the rate as of June 25, when the city approved a hike.

The rate hike went through in part because cabbies are screaming they can't make money in today's high-gas-cost environment.

In Vancouver, one hybrid-driving cabbie told me the vehicle is paying for itself, he's very happy with it and he's not going back to a conventional vehicle.

It left me wondering why no hybrids are showing up in Toronto's cab fleets, considering the gas-guzzling nature of the existing cabs.

A new generational marker in pop-culture slang is upon us.

Sure, Russia's respectable news media has been neutered and cowed (or killed, when the first two didn't work), but the mudslinging tabloids are going great guns dishing on celebrities and low level problems in Russian society.

And as long as they don't aim too high, the Kremlin is okay with that.

You know you want to. Step inside.

Here is the sign for one of my favourite greasy spoons on this continent:

Two lucky TV news anchors in Las Vegas get to pose with plastic glasses of MacDonald's iced coffee during their news-and-lifestyle morning show on the Fox affiliate.

From the Telegraph (thanks, Mungo):

This Monday readers of New Hampshire’s Valley News were surprised to see the paper's name spelled "Valley Newss" on the front page masthead.

The following day the newspaper, which covers the Upper Valley area straddling New Hampshire and Vermont, published an “Editor’s Note” acknowledging the error.

“Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page,” it read.

“Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for the mistakes, let us say for the record: We sure feel silly.”

Regret The Error had a posting about the error -- a posting that, ironically enough, had a correction appended to it. :)

A Haida Gwaii trio by the name of the Crabapple Creek Electric Jug Band has a ditty called Livin' At The Edge of the World (you can catch them at the Edge of the World music festival in Tlell this Aug. 8-10):

Here's where you can see the edge, at Rennell Sound:

Rennell Sound is reportedly the westernmost coastal place in Canada you can reach by vehicle. It sits on a latitude of 53.4 degrees North. If you shot an arrow westward from there, I'm guessing it would pass through the Aleutian islands before landing on the Pacific coast of Russia.

The above photo, taken from the campground at Gregory Creek, doesn't do justice to the magic of the place.

In old Haida villages in the Queen Charlotte Islands, also known as Haida Gwaii, the shamans had their own island (the one above is near the old village site of Skedans). Shamans were medicine men, but also a link between the world of humans and spirits (in our times, they've been busted down to herbalists).

Because the normal people feared the spiritual power of the shaman, they wanted them close, but not too close. The shamans lived, and were buried, on their islands.

After doing a boat tour around Louise Island, I spent last Friday night in Queen Charlotte at the town's Art Walk event. There were a lot of countercultural-looking people there.

One fellow who had been on the boat tour muttered to me -- and rather sneeringly, at that -- that many of the people in the crowd looked like they wouldn't wouldn't fit in anywhere else.

That had me wondering about whether I should consider Haida Gwaii to be an archipelago of shaman islands.

I mean that in the best possible way.

A cautionary tale about the perils of red-lining one's gasoline supply in far, far northwestern British Columbia.