COOPED UP - Pooped Out

It is now legal to keep chickens in your back yard in the City of Vancouver.

This is what your City Council is up to these days.

And they did it all without Kim Capri.

Can you say, "RATS!' boys and girls?

Vermin, stink, guano, foxes, coyotes, raccoons...

Sometimes you read things or hear abut them in the grocery store and you think, "No, that can't be. Who would do something that idiotic?"

So you dismiss the whole idea for a day or two and finally you go back and do the research, and, yes, they really did it.

Vancouver city council voted unanimously Thursday to change city bylaws to legalize the keeping of urban hens.

I will never run for office.

But if I was in council on the day such a nincompoop notion was raised I would squawk, "SHUT UP! GET OUT! We have serious business to do here."

This a city.

Or an approximation of one. A facsimile. We try to be a city.

In real cities, people don't even have lawns. They have parks and commons.

Chickens are for farms.

I buy my already slaughtered chicken at Safeway. After I do some things to it over a fire we like to call a stove, it's just fine thank you. Yummy.

My grandmother, who was born in Russia, bought live chickens from a farmer and killed them and prepared them in our kitchen sink.

IT WAS DISGUSTING!

I was very glad to leave 1950 Winnipeg behind.

Why are we revisiting a disease-ridden, plague-driven, stinky messy gulag lifestyle?

What next? Lions? Alligators?

How about a piranha tank at 12th and Cambie?

Where We've Been

Where We're Going

Hearst makes offers to Seattle staff for online-only publication

Associated Press - March 6, 2009

SEATTLE — Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has made offers to some staffers to participate in an online-only version of the newspaper, the P-I reported Thursday.

An unspecified number of the P-I's 181 employees received “provisional offers” Wednesday and Thursday to work for the online venture, the newspaper said in a story posted on its website.

The paper, quoting two reporters, said the job offers would be formalized if a website is approved by Hearst's senior management.

Hearst announced Jan. 9 that it was putting the P-I up for sale and said that if it couldn't find a buyer in 60 days the paper would likely close or continue to exist only online. There has been no word on a possible buyer.

Calls by The Associated Press to Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer were not immediately returned Thursday.

P-I Managing Editor David McCumber declined to comment. “I'd like this process to play itself out,” he told the AP.

He said he did not know exactly when the P-I would cease publishing its print edition.

“I don't have a sense of that,” he said Thursday. “There are a lot of moving parts, a lot of logistics, lots of things to be considered.”

Permanent layoffs won't occur any earlier than March 18, P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby informed the state Employment Security Department in a January letter.

Hearst said in its January announcement that if it does become an Internet-only operation, the P-I would have a “greatly reduced staff.”

Metro reporter Hector Castro said he received a provisional offer Thursday but declined it, saying the package wasn't good.

“They're talking about a small team of people working hard to make this a profitable venture,” Castro said, adding that he didn't know how many people were offered positions.

A number of staffers contacted by the AP declined to comment.

Sports columnist Art Thiel said Thursday he had not been contacted and that the news of a possible online venture didn't surprise him.

“They said they were thinking of online, now they're doing it,” he said.

Since 1983, the P-I has shared business operations with its cross-town rival, The Seattle Times, in a joint operating agreement.

Under the JOA, The Times handles advertising, printing and other non-news functions for the P-I, so the layoffs at the P-I would only affect newsroom staff.

The P-I has a weekday circulation of 117,000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The P-I was founded as the Seattle Gazette in 1863. Hearst has owned the P-I since 1921, and the paper has had operating losses since 2000, including $14 million last year.

Hearst is a major media company that also owns TV stations, other newspapers and magazines including Cosmopolitan.