THE WEEKLY EH?! // August 29th, 2023

This week's highlight of FIVE things happening in the Kimberley/Cranbrook area + FOUR other items of some locals' interests.

Hi!

Welcome to another edition of ‘THE WEEKLY EH?!’ newsletter!

Here’s Five Things

Since The 95EH Events Calendar gets updated with new Kimberley AND Cranbrook events on the regular (and it’s FREE for anybody to get their local events listed in this calendar, just create a public Facebook event OR hit the ‘Submit Event’ button over on moun.town/events), I like to do a weekly HIGHlight of FIVE things happening FOR the current week, EVERY Tuesday — as sometimes it’s nice to get a reminder of what’s going on before ‘the week ahead’ becomes another week that’s flown by (I mean… it’s already almost ‘hump day’ by the time I hit send on this thing!):

• THING #1: It’s apple capture season, and the good folks over at Wildsight Kimberley/Cranbrook are once again organizing a community apple pick n’ press to help keep a bunch of our overflowing apple trees from going to waste and/or attracting bears into town (“In 2022, 310 volunteers of the Apple Capture program picked 2,966 lbs of fruit from 45 yards and pressed about 2,697lbs of apples into 223L of juice! Some of this juice went home with volunteers while some was donated to our local Food Recovery programs in each community.”). Cranbrook’s first picking event is Wednesday, August 30th (4pm – 7pm, meet at the Public Produce Garden) and Kimberley’s first picking event is Sunday, September 3rd (10am – 2pm, meet at the Kimberley Community Garden) — but make sure to check the event poster below for future picking days + pressing days + a potluck & a harvest party (and visit Wildsight’s website for more info about their Apple Capture initiatives)!

• THING #2: On a related note, you can also expect to find picked n’ pressed apples (and all sorts of other locally grown / made things) at both the Kimberley Farmers Market (which happens on Thursdays from 5pm - 7:30pm on Howard Street ALL SUMMER… which also means there’s only 3 markets left for this year!) AND the Cranbrook Farmers Market (which happens on Saturdays from 10am - 1pm on 10th Ave S all the way until October 7th).

• THING #3: On an also related note, there will be an E-Mobility Roadshow happening at the Kimberley Farmers Market this Thursday — so now you can grab some local products and then “take the Ford F-150 Lightning for a spin, ride the e-scooter or try an e-bike” if that be something you’d fancy!

THING #4: August becomes September later this week, which means there’s another First Friday BBQ happening at Grist & Mash on September 1st… and this time it’s Mexican Night (“We have been perfecting our Carne Asada Steak Taco marinade. Made with local natural Kootenay beef and all the fixings. Veggie Options. Drink Specials. Kids Welcome! BBQ from 5pm-8pm”)! 🇲🇽 🇲🇽 🇲🇽

THING #5: If there’s a ‘First Friday’ happening this week, that means there must also be a First Saturdays happening this week (that’s just math) — so check the poster below to get a sense of everything that’s going on around the Platzl this Saturday (or jump over to ‘First Saturdays Kimberley BC’ on Facebook to check them out for more + follow for future ‘first Saturday’ updates)!

Of course, there's always more than Five Things happening in any given week, so don't forget you can always punch -> moun.town/events <- into any browser window at any time and be magically taken to THE 95EH EVENTS CALENDAR to see all the other events happening this week and beyond (and you can always reach out via email to 'hey@95eh.ca' if you have something of local area interest/intrigue that you think would be a good fit for a HWY 95EH signal boost) 👍

+ Four Ehs

And because there’s always more going on than just the local area events that get added to The 95EH Events Calendar, here’s 4 other things that are proving to be top of mind for at least one local area person (ie. myself):

• EH #1: I’ve been noticing more people commenting on the experience of Facebook/Meta not letting Canadians share links to news articles anymore (some folks have even started copy/pasting ALL THE TEXT from news articles into Facebook posts as a ‘work around’ to not being able to share links to “news”), which reminds me of how Twitter has also become a much less reliable place to access trusted news sources ever since Elon Musk let that sink in (which is also a reminder of how unreliable a news source even the news and newspapers can be, hence why people felt the need to turn to their curated social media bubbles to get better informed in the first place) — and I think the main takeaway here is that we all need to get better and smarter (quickly) at how we are using technology & the internet, individually AND collectively, before we completely squander our chance of having had (fairly) open access to all this revolutionary potential that would have only been possible to dream about a few decades previous (trust me… I’m just old enough to remember pre-internet times and they weren’t “better” — we were just more ignorant about what was really going on, hence that nostalgic feeling of bliss).

  There is so much more to what “being online” can mean than just the absorption of whatever the algorithms choose to feed us on the same handful of social media apps we log into every day to earn these billion dollar corporations their advertising money. But in order to realize just how much we could be doing/using ‘tech & internet stuff’ differently, we have to first realize that we’re going to need to actually figure out how to do/use a lot of this ‘tech & internet stuff’ better and smarter for ourselves; alone and together (because an exploitive system isn’t going to show us how to deconstruct itself). And I wouldn’t say that the stuff I do with HI54.BLOG and 95EH.CA are solutions to any one of these major societal problems — BUT — I would say that they both contain some examples of the kind of actions & intentions that we could all be doing more of to start building momentum towards working together towards living in a world that doesn’t have so many blatant man-made problems in need of rational solutions. Or, as David Graeber put it:

• EH #2: Related to the wide world of internet that’s out there to explore, I recently watched the 1998 comedy Dirty Work — because I’m a longtime Norm Macdonald appreciator and I had never actually watched that film of his. As for the movie itself, there’s definitely some funny ‘Norm humour’ in it + there’s also a lot of 90s comedy that hasn’t aged great (and you can currently watch it for FREE over on Tubi if you want to see if you would rate it higher than the 3.5 stars I gave it on my Letterbox). There’s also a Rewatchables podcast episode that talks more about Dirty Work and Norm out there, which was a nice follow-up experience to watching the movie + it also got me thinking more about Norm, which got me thinking about that rarely talked about early-2000s sitcom of his called ‘A Minute With Stan Hooper’, where, apparently, Norm said “his goal was for the show to lull its audience into complacency, and become more subversive as time went on; it included a plan for Stan's wife Molly to be murdered by a drifter at the end of the first season” (I think I also read about this in his great autobiography) — but the show got cancelled before Norm could steer the sitcom’s plot in that darker direction.

  Up until now, I had only seen an extremely bad quality upload on Youtube for this show, but a google the other day led me to a Reddit thread where someone linked to a slightly better quality version of the show AND… it really is quite a charming and funny old tv show, leaning nicely into the ridiculousness of typical 80s/90s sitcoms with some classic ‘small-town Norm humour’ sprinkled everywhere (the first episode even has the small town mayor running unopposed in the election… which anyone living in Kimberley can relate to, eh). Also, Fred Willard is in it and he is always great! So… if you like Norm Macdonald too, I highly recommend you use some ‘tech & internet stuff’ to check some of those above links out for yourself.

  

• EH #3: I’d like to give a special shout-out to 2 local feline collaborators, Maple and Bandit, who both lent their #CatsOfKimberley hashtag influence to the 95eh AND Hi54lofi Instagram accounts over the last month or so (meow)! And, I’m not sure if it was because of these cool cat’s social influence, but I’d also like to give a shout-out to the Kimberley Chamber of Commerce for wanting to sign up to start some ‘Mutually Beneficial Employment’ in September (and shout-out to the other 3 local businesses/organizations who started supporting The 95EH Events Calendar thru ‘MBE’ during the first trial run that was this month of August)!

• EH #4: By this time next week, Kimberley’s first curbside organics waste collection will have already taken place, SO, if you haven’t already, you should jump over to the Engage Kimberley site for not only a healthy amount of useful information, but there’s also a way to ask any questions you may have. Even if, like me, you live somewhere that is not a part of the curbside pick-up program or you already do your own composting (we take our apartment compost up to the KEGG.CA community garden), it’s still nice to see the effort being put in by the city to communicate how this positive community initiative is getting rolled out (for example, I learned that “all collected organics will be taken to a central processing facility run by the RDEK — they will be monitoring the quality of the compost for at least the first year and will then determine if it will be available for public use”, which was something I previously was wondering out loud about with no answer). Hopefully people will take the step-up in personal responsibility to make this a big success (and that we don’t have a bunch of related wildlife problems due to a lack of personal responsibility)… because turning organic waste into something helpful for growing more organic materials is a cool & smart thing to do (and I’m not just saying that because I’m sometimes referred to as ‘Jeremy The Compost Man’)!

Of course, there’s always more ‘eh?!’ to share than the 4 Ehs that came to my mind while putting together this week’s newsletter, so please make sure to follow 95EH on the Facebook & Instagram & Tumblr, especially if you frequent the highway 95/a/eh area where these signals are getting relayed from. And for more Jeremy/HI54-specific stuff, you can also follow @HI54LOFI on the Instagram & Twitter & Facebook.

Because, hey… there’s a lot of stuff going on out there, eh?!

Until next week…

Please feel free to reach out to ‘hey@95eh.ca’ if you have any questions, comments, ideas and/or schemes — and if you think you know anybody else that might enjoy receiving this weekly newsletter about “some locals’ interests” in the highway 95/a/eh area, please feel warmly encouraged to send them a link so they can have a think about signing up too!

🍻

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Jeremy // HI54LOFI