When I arrived at Five Sixty, coats, not people, occupied most of the chairs on the main stage. Amanda Palmer was scheduled to give a talk in less than an hour.

The idea for BIL came to Michael Cummings during the 2008 TED talks in Monterey, Calif. He and a group of friends wanted to hang out with TED people, even though they weren’t attending the conference, so they set up an event across the street, and 300 people showed up.

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Chelsea Enslow is one of only two female mechanics currently working at UBC’s Bike Kitchen. Besides helping people fix their bikes, Enslow also helps run workshops like “Women and Queer Night,” which happens the first Wednesday of every month.

“The purpose of Women and Queer Night is to both introduce people to the bike shop and to provide a safe space for someone who might not feel comfortable working in a regular bike shop environment,” Enslow said.

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Ten years ago, Vancouver’s PuSh festival was just a series of three performances. This year, the festival’s program includes 20 main stage performances, plus a club venue on Granville Island with 12 shows, along with youth programs, conversation series’ and films.

“[PuSh] is a performing arts festival that takes place over three weeks in January that presents theatre, dance, music, multimedia and everything in between,” said associate curator Joyce Rosario.

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UBC’s Hempology 101 usually holds its meetings outside the SUB, but last week, the club booked a room in the SUB and brought a vaporizer.

The meeting was a joint event staged in conjunction with the Brewery Club, which is working on infusing beer with marijuana. However, the highlight of the reunion wasn’t the beer syrup or the early stages of pot-infused alcohol, but rather the use of a marijuana vaporizer.

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“I am looking and I am seeing with the eyes you taught me to use,” read one of the installations at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, where audiences were invited to witness the stories of people affected in one way or another by the residential school system.

Upon entering the first room of Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, which concluded the Belkin’s year of programming this past weekend, visitors were greeted by a pile of torn up clothes that looked like regalia, scissors lying next to the torn garments on the floor.

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If you’ve ever been to Man Up, a monthly drag king show and queer dance party at the Cobalt in East Van, you’ve probably witnessed a lot of fun times. But you might have missed their sober patrol, also known as the Buddy System.

The Buddy System was started at Man Up in February of this year by the main organizer and host, Paige Frewer, and her friend, Pussy Liquor, who has been doing community and harm reduction work for about 10 years.

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When the Hollywood Theatre opened in 1935, its billboard might have been Vancouver’s first permanently attached neon sign.

The art deco theatre, located at 3123 West Broadway — a mere four bus stops away from campus on the 99 — is listed on the city’s heritage register. But its original wrought iron seats and its ticket machine, one of a few in North America still in working condition, might not be enough to prevent the current owner from turning it into a fitness centre.

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Chicken of the woods, fairy ring, rosy gomphidius, bear’s head tooth — B.C. mushroom varieties are as colourful as their names, and many of them can be found right here on campus.

On a Tuesday several weeks ago, about 80 people filled the Van Dusen Botanical Garden. They were walking around tables covered in mushrooms. Most of the mushrooms were carefully placed on paper napkins, so people could come up to the tables and pick them up to inspect them. Some even smelled them.

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In 1973, a group of eight artists bought a building in Mount Pleasant that once belonged to a secretive fraternity known as the “Knights of Pythia.” Their idea was to create a place where artists could live and create art. This resulted in the creation of Western Front, one of the oldest artist-run art spaces in Canada.

“Western Front sort of originated as a relationship between art and life that was quite fluid,” said Sarah Todd, curator of the media arts program at the Front.

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In red letters on a white background, Rebecca Belmore’s installation at Satellite Gallery reads: “Somewhere between a town a mine and a reserve is a line.”

Is there really a line, though?

Ten Thousand Suns, a new exhibit at Satellite, explores this question through sculpture, audio, video and performance. The exhibition is a collaboration between artists from B.C., the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Ontario, Argentina, Iran and Mexico.

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