It was a busy weekend with the Lakers Car Club Annual Spring Round-Up Show and Shine taking place downtown (and pictured here) and the Children’s Festival attracting young ones in Boitanio Park (though, unfortunately, Todd screwed up those pictures). On top of that, the Williams Lake Studio Theatre’s production of Crimes of the Heart won the Central Interior Zone festival’s best production and is now off to Mainstage in Kamloops. Whew! What’s going on next weekend?
We spent the weekend in Kamloops attending the ‘Imagine No Religion 2’ conference, a gathering focused on atheism, secularism, humanism, and science. The event featured talks from people like Matt Dillahunty, probably best known as host of The Atheist Experience, a public access television show out of Austin, Texas, which has gained fame thanks to the Internet, and Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist whose new book, A Universe from Nothing, explains how the something that is all around us could have emerged from nothing at all.
The conference opened on Friday night with a debate which featured Dillahunty, Christopher DiCarlo take on Christian Apologists Michael Horner and Paul Chamberlain, discussing whether God (or gods) exists. We’ll have more in the June issue of The Stew.
Put on a happy face — the May 2012 issue is live!
We’ve opened up the magical tubes of the Internet and uploaded the electronic versions of our Mental Health Issue — also known as the May 2012 issue. You can download a PDF to your PC, tablet, or smartphone, or you can read the browser friendly version right here. Enjoy!
While out and about today, we happened upon not one but two Farmers’ Markets — one in 100 Mile House (where we were delivering the May issue of The Stew) and one in Williams Lake. The weather was perfect in both locations, and we enjoyed our stops at both markets (and baby Morrigan enjoyed her rhubarb muffin).
Drum and Bell Tower (aka Brent Morton) was among the performers at last weekend’s ‘Awaken The Dreamer; Changing The Dream’ event held last weekend at Thompson Rivers University.
With the goal of being thought-provoking and inspiring, the symposium offered interactive multimedia presentations by respected scientists, indigenous leaders and visionary voices of our time.
Participating groups included: Williams Lake Social Planning Committee, Williams Lake Food Policy Council, The Potato House Project, and the Williams Lake Transition Town Initiative, among others.
On Monday we took a bit of a road trip to visit Thea Fast, the owner / operator of Human Be Herd and Equine Facilitated Personal Development in Beaver Valley. Juli will have a full report on her experience in the May issue of The Stew, but if you’d like to know more about the sort of work Thea does, you can visit her site at www.humanbeherd.com.
Hootenanny Café on March 10th was RIGHTEOUS!
Drum and Bell Tower Concert Presented by Momentum Productions.
Get outdoors! The April 2012 issue has gone live!
It’s probably our fault that it snowed on the same day that we sent our April 2012 issue — the issue proclaiming the arrival of spring — to press, so we’re sorry about that. If you need to shake off the last of the winter blahs, though, why not take a read through our new issue? As always, we have a PDF version for offline reading, and a web-friendly version you can check out right in your browser. Now just close your eyes and imagine you’re reading under the warm sun, relaxing on the shore by a lake somewhere. See, it’s just like spring, right?
The brand new Rick Hansen monument was unveiled this morning outside the Tourism Discovery Center in Williams Lake. The monument, honouring Hansen and his Man In Motion world tour, arrives just in time for the 25th anniversary of Hansen’s trip around the world.
On hand for the unveiling were Hansen himself as well as a number of local dignitaries including Mayor Kerry Cook and Councillor Surinderpal Rathor. A sizey crowd was also on hand, filling the TDC’s parking lot with locals eager to get their first look at the monument.
We’ve officially released March 2012 into the wild
That time has come again, and the March 2012 edition of The Stew Magazine has been released into the wild. You can download a PDF to enjoy offline, or you can read our browser-friendly version, depending on your preference. The print version will, of course, start appearing on newsstands shortly.
We dropped by the Station House Gallery’s opening in Williams Lake last week to check out the work of local artists Ann Nicholson (in the main gallery) and Casey Bennet (in the upper Gallery). Both shows will be up until the end of the month if you want the chance to check ‘em out.
2012 Academy Awards Predictions (Part 2)
By Juli Harland
THE STEW MAGAZINE
It is that time of year again, the Academy Award celebrations are this evening and the throngs of the famous will be anxiously awaiting the Oscar winning announcements on the edges of their size 2 seats.
Each year Todd and I sit anticipation watching the Oscars, ourselves, for our own competitive reasons. For every year we challenge each other to see who can predict the most winners before the show.
So far I like to think that I am coming out ahead in the annual friendly (mostly) competition; and I am looking forward to keeping the streak alive.
To be fair, neither of us have seen all the films up for awards (in fact not many of them at all). The predictions are all based on hunches, past directorial achievements, who’s who in Hollywood, and sometimes just because the name of the film sounds cool.
Regardless, here are my predictions for the 2012 Oscars:
2012 Academy Awards Predictions
By Todd Sullivan
THE STEW MAGAZINE
Every year, for probably more than a decade now, I like to take a crack at predicting the Academy Awards. I usually do this with as little knowledge of the actual films as possible, choosing to, instead, predict them based on equal parts luck, guess-work, and noticing what films everyone seems to be talking about. So far, this has served me not terribly well, but not entirely terribly either — I usually clock in somewhere between 50 and 60% accuracy.
This year, I’ll be using the exact same process to make my Oscar predictions. Read on if you’d like to hear my inane thoughts on the most important movie contest in Hollywood. Here we go, in no particular order (except this the order they came up at the oscar.com website):
Fitness Challenge 2012: Weeks one through three
By Todd Sullivan
THE STEW MAGAZINE
As the sun dawns over the start of a brand new year, we each find ourselves facing the resolutions we made in the fading weeks and days of 2011, and we wonder, what were we thinking?
For me, one of those resolutions – one to get into better shape – has led me, for the second year in a row, to the Fit City Body Transformation Challenge, a challenge to transform your body into something new, something different, something better in the span of 90 days. And waiting at the end of the challenge for one lucky winner? A $2,000 travel voucher.
Now if I’m to be perfectly honest, I doubt I have much chance of winning, so it’s something else that has to motivate me to drag my ass to the gym each and every day. And that thing is simply a sincere desire to be healthier and in better shape.
