Six months of planning, almost 1,000 volunteers and four takes amounted to one viral video that has attracted more than 400,000 views since being posted on YouTube Friday.
University of B.C. students Andrew Cohen and Bijan Ahmadian masterminded the lip-dub video where a roving camera follows the lead of singing and dancing students through a massive air-band performance to songs by Marianas Trench and Pink around the Vancouver campus.
The performance follows the University of Victoria’s video set to Michael Buble’s Haven’t Met You Yet that has drawn more than 219,000 views since its September release.
“Just saying UVic had 900 people come out definitely helped us with our numbers,” Cohen explained Monday. “It’s definitely a friendly rivalry … well, not a rivalry necessarily, but definitely, a little brotherly competition never hurt anybody.”
They arrived anxious and hungry.
“We had prepped for hour and hours and when Saturday rolled around at 10 a.m. eight people showed up and we fed them,” Malloreigh Hamilton recalled of that January morning. “Then at 11 a.m. another eight people showed up and we fed them.”
But the opening wasn’t for a restaurant. Rather, the 25-year-old converted her modest 400-square-foot East Vancouver apartment into the city’s latest underground eatery, collecting a $10 donation per plate.
It’s a growing enterprise that has caught the eye of health officials and raised a debate about whether inspectors belong in the personal dining rooms of the people like Hamilton.
For some Star Trek fans, the iconic science fiction series will always be worth watching for those clingy red velour miniskirts.
"Miniskirts were really short back in the 1960s and whenever the starship Enterprise got hit by a Klingon disruptor blast you'd always see miniskirts flying around," said Trekker Charles Bae.
But when pressed about why the Star Trek canon has endured for more than four decades, Bae, like thousands of others who will transport themselves to the Sheraton Wall Centre this weekend for a star-studded convention, believes the morality tale set in the future has stood the test of time.
"It paints a bright vision of the future," said the 3-D modeling student. "It inspires me to always dream big, to think of better ways to do things, and to play a role in the future that humanity has."
Vancouver's own Martha Stewart of marijuana is making a compelling case for consuming cannabis.
Watermelon, best known for beating trafficking charges for selling sticky-icky ginger snap cookies at Wreck beach, is sharing her recipes with medicinal marijuana users through her Baking a Fool of Myself cooking show, which at first glance has more in common with Julia Child than Cheech and Chong.
The Commercial Drive resident explained her production makes marijuana accessible as a treatment for people living with illness, but are skittish about smoking their medicine.
"Food removes the stigma that we've all been inundated with for years," she said. "You have this old propaganda that lurks in the back of our minds that smoke has this bad connotation like, where there's smoke there's fire. It's just never good."
Not everybody's meant to be an overnight celebrity, explains Vancouver-based artist Moka Only.
"Sometimes," he says, "it's a long simmering boil like chicken soup on a stovetop at five in the afternoon, on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo."
The rapper's career moved from Canada's musical back burner to the front after gaining critical acclaim and mainstream success for his work with Swollen Members a decade ago.
Since, the wordsmith has released albums at a rate of four per year, including his latest, Saffron, attributed to his alter ego Ron Contour.
There's no clause in YouTube's terms and agreements that says a broadcaster can't touch her breasts.
But exotic entertainer Samantha Mack had one of her videos promoting a breast cancer research benefit stripped from the user-generated video site last week after it was flagged as inappropriate.
Mack says the clip, which shows her wearing a bustier then different bikini tops, was campy and shed a softer side on adult entertainment.
"The raciest thing I say is, 'tip a stripper save a tit,' " she said. "I've done other videos where I drop F-bombs and another video where I'm miming a little 'sumthin, sumthin' and they've been up for 10 months."
Social media is not a tool of radical and transformative change but rather an instrument of the status quo, argued a world-renowned pop sociologist.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of a string of best-selling books including The Tipping Point, played devil's advocate during his keynote address at F5 Expo, a conference on refreshing business strategies through changing technologies, by saying there's no foundation to social networking.
"Weak-tied networks using things like social media are really easy to put together but that means that they're really easy to take apart," said the Canadian-born journalist. "Networks, on the contrary, that are built through strong ties are really, really hard to put together but they are hard to take apart."
Stigmas surrounding mental health don’t cease at the bus stop.
The average rider – from the 9-to-5 crowd – could sit beside someone suffering from a mental illness and not know the difference until a verbal or physical conflict erupts.
As events unfold unpredictably passengers are often faced with what seems like two courses of action: Step up or stand back.
But diffusing a volatile situation set in sardine can about to burst isn’t a black-and-white proposition, according to Barbara Fee, Canadian Mental Health Association public education program manager.
Rick Hansen continued to set the bar for progress by announcing the launch of an international institute on spinal cord injury research on the 25th anniversary of the first day of the Man In Motion tour.
The Rick Hansen Institute will connect research centres around the world, through a database, to collaborate on best practices for treatment, create a common language among clinicians, and commence clinical trials when new discoveries are made in the laboratory.
“We’ll have thousands of patients all from this global network ready to be applied to these clinical trials, to be able to accelerate the discovery,” Hansen told media Sunday. “We’ll be able to move closer and closer to the cure.”
Abandoning Save-On-Meats isn't an option for 78-year-old Albert Des Lauriers.
The butcher shop's three-story neon sign punctuated by a flying pink pig continues to hum on Hastings Street despite Des Lauriers' intention to retire in March after running the store for more than 50 years.
The owner went as far as closing the meat counter and produce department but has struggled to find a buyer for the building who will keep Save-On-Meats as a grocery store.
"It's the same old story," he said. "Either they have experience but absolutely no capital or they have capital but no experience. What you need is somebody who has both."
A British Columbia billboard campaign for Coors beer is being pulled after area Torontonians were offended by the ad.
About 30 billboards scattered across the province boldly state Coors Light is “colder than people from Toronto”.
Adam Moffat, Molson brand and marketing public relations manager, said a handful of offended customers e-mailed to complain.
But, when news of the billboards spread yesterday, a public relations firestorm erupted.