Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Below I have listed the restaurants that I have found (so far!) that serve Shark Fin Soup in the Lower Mainland. I have a very strong feeling that I have only scratched the surface of this list, but it all starts with demand!

If there is a demand for shark fins, then sharks will continue to be slaughtered!

Take action today by not eating in these restaurants… Maybe even write a letter or two!

Pink Pearl Chinese Restaurant
1132 East Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC, V6A 1S2

Imperial Chinese Seafood Restaurant
Main Floor, Marine Building, 355 Burrard Street, Vancouver, BC, V6C 2G8

Fortune House Seafood Restaurant
247 – 4700 Kingsway, Burnaby, BC, V5H 4M1

Dun Huang Seafood Restaurant
705 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 1J5

Chinatown Floata Seafood Restaurant
Chinatown Plaza, 400-180 Keefer Street, Vancouver, BC, V6A 4E9

Kirin Mandarin Restaurant
1166 Alberni Street, Vancouver, BC, V6E 3Z3

Kirin Mandarin Restaurant
2nd Floor, City Square, 555 West 12th Avenue (& Cambie Street), Vancouver, BC, V5Z 3X7

Kirin Mandarin Restaurant
2nd Floor, Three West Centre, 7900 Westminster Highway (& No. 3 Road), Richmond, BC, V6X 1A5

Kirin Mandarin Restaurant
2nd Floor, Henderson Place, 1163 Pinetree Way (& Lincoln Avenue), Coquitlam, BC, V3B 8A9

Sun Sui Wah Seafood Restaurant
3888 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, V5V 3R8

Yun Mei Restaurant
2436 West 41st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V6M 2A7

Szechuan Chongqing Seafood Restaurant
205 – 1668 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC, V6J 1X6

Spicy Court Chinese Restaurant
5638 Cambie Street, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 3A5

U-Bento Japanese Restaurant
2568 Arbutus Street, Vancouver, BC, V6J 3Y2

Please add to this list if you find more establishments that serve Shark Fin Soup! Or if you know that any of these restaurants are no longer serving, let me know… I am all for celebrating that!!!

Post: 14-Jun-07 01:10 PM by john
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Fisherman’s Terrace Seafood Restaurant
3580 – 4151 Hazelbridge Way, Richmond, BC, V6X 4J7

Shota Sushi and Grill
5688 Yew Street, Vancouver, BC, V6M 3Y3

Nikkyu Japanese Restaurant
3302 Main Street, Vancouver, BC, V5V 3M7

Neptune Seafood Restaurant
100 – 8171 Ackroyd Road, Richmond, BC, V6X 3K1

Post: 23-Jul-07 10:07 AM by john
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Not only does T & T Supermarket carry frozen shark fin and other shark derived products, in their seafood section they also have “live” rockfish, lingcod and kelp greenlings in stagnant tanks that look diseased.

Here are their store locations:

Central City (Central City Shopping Centre)
3000 Central City, 10153 King George Highway, Surrey, BC, V3T 2W1

Chinatown (Keefer & Abbott)
179 Keefer Place, Vancouver, BC, V6B 6C1

First Ave (First & Renfrew)
100-2800 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V5M 4N8

Richmond (President Plaza)
1000-8181 Cambie Road, Richmond, BC, V6X 1J8

Osaka (Yaohan Centre)
1000-3700 No. 3 Road, Richmond, BC, V6X 3X2

Coquitlam (Coquitlam Centre)
2740-2929 Barnet Highway, Coquitlam, BC, V3B 5R5

Metrotown (Metropolis at Metrotown)
147-4800 Kingsway, Burnaby, BC, V5H 4J2

Surrey (100th Avenue & 152nd Street)
101T-15277 100th Avenue, Surrey, BC, V3R 8X2

They have stores in Alberta and Ontario as well.

Post: 23-Aug-07 10:00 AM by john
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New name, same tired menu… Formerly named U-Bento, i Sushi Japanese Restaurant continues to serve shark fin nigiri.

i Sushi Japanese Restaurant
2568 Arbutus Street, Vancouver, BC, V6J 3Y2

I took a couple hundred pieces of art to V-Con to sell. I had Joyce frame about ten or so pieces (mostly paintings) and I also brought three binders with clear sleeves in them that were filled with (mostly pencil) drawings, and one RED binder with no sleeves, just maybe a hundred drawings. The red binder says “Each drawing in this binder only $10 each.” Those were drawings I don’t care to ever see again. Not that they are all bad or anything, I just find them to be dull. Everything in the other binders ranged from $35 to $135, and my painting I went up to I think $500 on the big one. I didn’t know how to price any of them but everything I read on the internet was “don’t undersell your paintings.” So, I tried not to do that.

When I went back to V-Con on Sunday to pick them up I had a few people approach me about how much they liked my art. One guy, the auctioneer, said that they were very good but overpriced. I sold about $110 worth of art, and I believe it was from 11 of those $10 drawings. This could mean one of two things: V-Con is not the best place to sell art; or I really did overprice them.

Anyway I’m taking some pieces to Strategies Games on Main and 23rd to have hang in their gaming area in the back. I think I will leave prices off and just leave some cards or something with my contact information.

ps – World Fantasy Con is happening in Calgary next year around this time. This year it was in New York, so obviously Calgary is a little more realistic for me to approach. I think that I will go. Anyone want to come with? NERD ROAD TRIP!!! I may rent a car so I don’t have to worry about packing my paintings into a plane.

I just had a rather bodacious idea. Wouldn’t it be neat to create a play, the setting of which would be an operating theater, and the venue of which would be…an operating theater! There must be one in town somewhere. Maybe at Riverview or one of the older hospitals? I think that would be really cool.

Here’s the Bloodshots cut of “The Vessel.”

*Here* ARE THE SUBMITTED FILMS FOR BLOODSHOTS CANADA 2007. TO VOTE ON A FILM, email your vote for BEST FILM to: bigsmashproductions@gmail.com NO LATER THAN 7PM pst FRIDAY OCT. 26th. Only one vote per email address accepted.

Press pause when you get to the Scrabble board!

Ironically enough in the Scrabulous game I’m playing with Josh I got a bingo with the word TENTACLE. For reals!

Last week saw the last session of our year-long Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign for Call of Cthulhu the roleplaying game. It ended more-or-less successful. Many characters died horribly at the end of a tentacle (or similar godly appendage), though my character only lost his eyes. Thanks to Mike, David, Palle, John, and special guest stars Jason and Geisel for playing with, and of course Caleb for running the damned thing! I owned that book for years and never though I’d actually play through it. I even had a sip of champagne to toast the end of a most entertaining campaign. Hey, campaign and champagne rhyme.

And this week saw the premiere session of my Freeport piratey D&D campaign. I’m re-running the classic Freeport trilogy starting with Death in Freeport from my favourite publishers, Green Ronin. Today we finalized the characters and I think we have a pretty interesting group. There are in total nine (9) players in the group, thanks to my policy of over-booking. Question not my methods, for indeed three of the players had to cancel in the few days prior to the session, so we had a healthy 6 players + 1 DM at the table. Of course there is always the chance that all nine players will show up and there won’t be enough space at the table, but likewise there is the chance that six players may bail and we won’t have quorum to play! We’ll see which happens first.

I’m introducing a few intriguing new (for me) concepts into this D&D campaign. First, we’re taking a page out of 4th edition and condensing some of the skills. For example, Sleight of Hand + Move Silently + Hide all become one skill: Stealth.

Secondly, critical hits don’t do double damage: they have gruesome effects at DM discretion. This may be way worse than double damage, or not as good. Depends on whether you’re a PC or an NPC. Hello eye patches, hooks and peg-legs!

Thirdly, action points! Each player has action points to spend on rule-bending options like rerolling, acting out of initiative, and suchlike.

Fourthly, the campaign world is a grim and gritty world where magic, monsters and non-humans are rare. The only non-human the characters have seen so far is an elf, and she’s a PC. No gnomes, no halflings, no orcs, no dwarves (yet). Tolerance towards non-humans is low, and tolerance towards arcane magic (what people call The Dark Arts) is lower still – you won’t find any storefronts bearing the sign “Ye Old Magic Shoppe.” As such I discouraged wizard & sorcerer classes. But we do have a number of rogues and clerics in the group, and a ninja!

As per my previous campaigns: no alignments, and Experience Points have nothing to do with how many things you kill – it’s doled out in lump sums at DM discretion.

I just saw an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise that I had never seen before – and it was really good. Even though it was a very ST:The Next Generation storyline, it fit well into the whole “figuring out what interacting with alien planets and cultures is all about” theme that should have been the primary focus of Enterprise.

Briefly, the story was about meeting a species that had three genders, and the third gender, a “cogenitor” that they referred to as ‘it,’ was treated as a third class citizen in the the alien culture even though it had just as much “potential” as the other genders. So Trip starts to teach it to read and whatnot behind the backs of the other aliens and eventually it requests sanctuary on Enterprise (more or less). Even though the episode ended pretty much perfectly as a self-contained story in this series, I personally thought “wouldn’t it be cool if they had taken this character into the roster and we could all watch the characters shake it out.” But no, we’re stuck with the same old wooden whitebread personalities (Dr Phlox excepted of course). I felt the same way in the episode where the crew had to rescue Captain Archer from the Klingon penal colony Rura Penthe (yes the same one from Star Trek VI) and they offered to take along the Klingon lawyer who was sentenced along with Archer. But of course the Klingon refused with some halfassed reason.

On Saturday morning Mike called with a couple very important questions.

Several weeks ago, when Mike asked if I was available to be on his Bloodshots 24 Hour Filming Frenzy team this year I unfortunately had to say no, because of the show in Chilliwack on Saturday, and V-Con. (More on both of those later.) You may recall that a couple years ago I was involved in The Veil (which by the way, you can see at http://www.intake.ca/main.php – just click on THRILLERS at the bottom), which was Mike & Co.’s entry for that year. The subgenre of horror they drew was “Lovecraftian,” so Mike called on me as story consultant and I also ended up playing “The Doctor” for a brief cameo.

Well, this year they again drew the “Lovecraftian” subgenre and so the first question that Mike asked me when he called on Saturday was “are you available in an hour for a bit of filming?” I got out of bed, had a quick shower and biked over there to reprise my role for Mike’s first ever sequel. By the time you read this, “The Vessel” is finished and submitted to the Bloodshots staff. The screening of the films is on Wednesday at the ANZA club and unfortunately that’s the first night of my new Freeport D&D campaign which I daren’t shirk off. But I can’t wait for the next available screening to see how it all turns out! Especially since the second question Mike asked was “can we use a Thickets song in the end credits” and as of this writing I have no idea which song he chose, if any.

That, in a nutshell, describes the show we had in Chilliwack last night. The performance was not great, and the crowd and venue were…atypical but interesting. There are shows that you know are good, and there are shows that are so ridiculous that you just have to say “what the hell — if it can’t be good, it can be stupid.” And stupid is usually fun. There is something to be said for just giving up caring about remembering lyrics correctly and instead just doing goofy shit. Memories that last a lifetime! So yeah, not our best show but definitely an amusing time was had by all. Special thanks to Don for driving me and Mario out there, and for taking video with his camera that I hope to post here and on the Thickets youtube group.

photos courtesy Don Chambers

Because sometimes you just want to watch a young James Earl Jones count to 10.

Right about now is the start of Saturday Oct 20, which is the start of the annual 24 Hour Comics Day…

…an annual event where cartoonists around the world each try to create 24 pages of comics in 24 hours.

Last year, over 1200 cartoonists took part at events in 17 countries.
On October 20th, 2007, cartoonists around the world will face the 24 hour comics challenge. To help these cartoonists, some comic book stores, educational institutions, libraries, businesses, and comics clubs will host special 24 Hour Comics Day events. They’ll provide cartoonists with a space to work, access to food and drink, and camaraderie.

I really wish I had the time to participate! Stupid awesome rock band making me go to Chilliwack this weekend. If anyone who is interested in this CAN do so, Elfsar is hosting an event, as follows:

Elfsar Comics & Toys Annual Fundraiser begins Saturday morning at 10am – and you can still be a part!!

Participating in the global and international 24 Hour Comics Day for the fourth consecutive year, Elfsar is proud to go one step above giving creators the opportunity to flex their comic making muscles. Using their talent to give back to the community, the participants who will be at Elfsar
for 24 hours straight, each creating their own 24 page comic, will be in effect raising monies for Vancouver Food Bank.

All participants are reminded to bring their paper, sharpest pencils, finest inks and any of their favorite snacks. (Don’t worry we will be providing one good meal to get them through the full event) Spectators are welcome to come by ANYTIME as the store will be open for the entire 24 hours!

Donations for The Vancouver Food Bank will also be accepted throughout the event and anyone wishing to support our creators in other means can drop off anything from bottled water to snacks as well.

24 Hour Comics Day – the most challenging story making event in the world begins tomorrow at 10 am (doors open at 9) and ends Sunday at 10 am! The full details can be found on our website! Look forward to seeing you there!

From the store that’s more than just selling you comics and toys,

-Elfsar Comics

ELFSAR COMICS & TOYS. 2007 OUTSTANDING COMIC RETAILER AWARD FINALIST! FEATURED IN BEST OF VANCOUVER 2006 & 2007! www.elfsar.com (604) 688-5922
Open 7 Days a Week
1007 Hamilton St. (Open Late) Wed – Fri 10:30 – 9:00
Vancouver, BC Mon, Tues & Sat – 11:00 – 6:00
Canada V6B 5T4 Sundays – 12:00 – 6:00