Ronald Nijdam, owner of The Quick Cobbler, runs a program that has collected, repaired and donated more than 25,000 pairs of shoes to organizations serving the homeless, such as the Salvation Army and Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

The operation is the only one of its kind in town, Nijdam said, and donations have recently peaked thanks to spring cleaning. Still, he adds, it never hurts to get more.

“People helping the homeless, those organizations, they never seem to say to us, ‘Hey, you know what, we’re full, we can’t have any more,’” he said.

“They always take more, and on the other hand, there’s so many shoes coming in to us, so somehow this is working.”

Nijdam said he has heard lots of stories of people wearing his shoes to job interviews and being successful, or of cash-strapped single mothers grateful to be able to keep up with their kids’ growth-spurts. He noted that kids shoes are especially popular since they rarely get worn out before they are outgrown.

He said a few weeks ago someone from Vancouver Island who heard about the program even started a drive to collect shoes and brought a whole van-load over containing thousands of them.

“[The employee who unloaded them] was busy for a full day,” he chuckled.

What: The Homeless Shoes Program at The Quick Cobbler
Where: 430 W 2nd Ave., Vancouver
Hours: Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. — 5 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. – 5p.m.

By now, more than 14 million people have watched the YouTube video of the Canadian commander playing the Larrivee parlour guitar while sitting in a tin can high above the world.

NASA purchased two of the three-quarter size guitars more than a decade ago because of their compact size, but they were later discontinued. In response to a surge of interest in the P-01 model Hadfield plays in the video, the company has released a commemorative edition, and has already done $100,000 in sales.

“It makes us so proud,” said Matthew Larrivee, one of the company’s general managers, whose father, Jean Larrivee, founded the business in Toronto in 1967.

“Chris has just been such a great ambassador for guitar and for space. He’s making space cool again, and that is so cool.”

Before his last mission, Hadfield took a tour of Larrivee’s Vancouver headquarters, and explained why NASA bought the guitars.

“When you’re a long way from home, when you’ve left the planet, it’s really important not just to take care of all the technical stuff, but you’ve got to take care of the people and the psychological side,” Hadfield said.

“We have psych support people in Houston, and they realized that music is one of the things that’s really fundamental to people, so they were looking for a guitar to put on the Space Station.”

Hadfield estimates the Larrivee guitar has been around the world more than 50,000 times. The other one NASA bought stays on the ground as a physical record.

“Heck of a round-the-world tour,” Hadfield quipped.

The re-issued ISS Commemorative Edition of NASA’s guitar retails for $1,200, and Larrivee said orders have been pouring in from around the world, particularly the U.S. and the U.K.

“I’m a huge, huge fan of the Space Program, and particularly the Shuttle Program, and so for me I went wild with it,” Larrivee said of learning several years ago that his family’s guitar had been launched into orbit.

“As a guitar maker, I just look at it and go, ‘boy that is so neat I have a guitar on the Space Station.’”

People of all ages are invited to help construct the Star Wars Jedi Master this long weekend to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the LEGO Store opening at Oakridge Centre.

Kids will be given a set of LEGO to turn into a brick, which they can then hand to master builder Dan Steininger to add to the model.

The project hours are from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday.

May the LEGO be with you!

Transportation employees, who include cabbies, have filed 199 mental stress claims since compensation was extended last July to those who develop mental disorders as a result of one or more significant workplace stressors, such as bullying and harassment.

Retired 99 B-Line driver Bill Steer told Metro it doesn’t surprise him.

“It’s not the easiest job in town, that’s for sure,” he said.

“Some of my buddies have been physically assaulted. Some of them have just had passengers on the bus that are nothing but ragging on them while they’re trying to drive.”

Don McLeod, head of the Canadian Auto Workers Local 111, which represents Metro Vancouver bus drivers, told The Province there are about 150 reported assaults on bus drivers every year.

One Vancouver driver, Charles Dixon, has resorted to wearing padded boxing headgear to protect his head while working after suffering a vicious assault at the hands of a passenger who left him with a concussion and brain injury.

Worksafe BC spokeswoman Megan Johnston said only health care workers racked up more mental stress claims than transportation workers, with 463 since last July—though there are far more health care workers than transportation workers.

She explained that prior to Bill 14 coming into effect on July 1, 2012, compensation was payable only to employees who suffered mental stress as an acute reaction to a sudden or unexpected traumatic event at work.

Here are the number of mental stress claims filed by sector since July 1, 2012, in descending order:

Health care sector: 463
Transportation: 199
Accommodation, food and leisure: 141
Retail: 134
Education: 105
Public administration: 90
Business services: 81
Provincial government and Crown corporations that are self-funded: 61
Across other sectors with small claims volumes: 434

-With files from The Canadian Press

They’re boneless, brainless, heartless, and dangerous. They poop through their mouths, and they’re doing it while on display right now at an aquarium near you.

The Jelly Invasion exhibit made its debut Thursday at the Vancouver Aquarium, featuring more than 15 species from around the world.

Interpretive specialist Alex Clegg said the aquarium decided to showcase the stinging invertebrates because they have been making headlines in recent years.

“Invasions of jellyfish and jellyfish blooms are happening in areas, and people are curious about where all these jellyfish are coming from,” he said.

B.C. is home to about 75 species of jellyfish, including plenty of moon jellies, which can form huge blooms and have been known to shut down power plants by clogging up water intake pipes in other parts of the world.

“We go through annual cycles, just like most other places that have jellyfish,” he said.

Indian Arm is particularly prone to blooms of colourful orange lion’s mane jellies, he added, because they get pushed into the fjord and can’t get out again.

In the open ocean lion’s mane jellies can grow to be 60 metres — the length of five public transit buses — but in B.C., Clegg said, the largest one he has ever seen was the size of a basketball.

“They’re all over,” he said. “You could probably find them off English Bay.”

He said humans are spurring the apparent boom in jellyfish populations worldwide, and raising awareness is part of the Aquarium’s motive for hosting the exhibit.

Clegg said jellyfish thrive in overfished and polluted areas with intense algae blooms, since their prey –mainly plankton — feed primarily on algae.

Climate change and nutrient-rich agricultural runoff are contributing to the problem.

The exhibit contains some practical information as well, such as an explanation why scraping the clinging cells of a jellyfish off your skin with a credit card is a much better solution to a sting than peeing on it.

To view the daily schedule of Jelly Invasion, visit www.vanaqua.org. To watch the spotted jellies on their Jelly Cam, click here.

That was the explanation offered Wednesday by two of the nation’s most prominent pollsters when asked how they, along with all their competitors, managed to get B.C.’s election forecasts so completely, utterly wrong.

Ipsos Reid public affairs vice president Kyle Braid said 70 to 80 per cent of Canadians tend to express the intention to vote in federal elections, even through the actual turnout is usually closer to 60 per cent.

“I know that in the 2009 election, somewhere around 65 per cent of British Columbians said they were going to vote, and we ended up with around a 51 per cent turnout,” Braid said.

“All that does is point to the lack of reliability in asking that question, which says that we need a better way of figuring out who the voters are.”

Mario Canseco, vice president of Angus Reid Public Opinion, said the trend is even more pronounced among young voters ages 18 to 34 — who said they were twice as likely to vote B.C. NDP this election as Liberal.

Canseco explained that there may be a methodological flaw in the fact that pollsters base their predictions of the makeup of the electorate on data pulled from the census.

It won’t be clear until Elections BC releases the results of its exit polls whether more young voters did indeed skip the ballot box on Tuesday. But historically, more than half of the province’s electorate has been made up of voters over 55, and just 16 per cent of those aged 18 to 35.

“We’re talking to young people, but are we talking to too many young people?” Canseco wondered aloud.

“…It’s not necessarily that they changed their mind, it’s just that they were not as big a component of the actual electorate who showed up to vote [Tuesday] as we thought.”

Canseco noted Angus Reid has correctly predicted the outcomes of 32 out of 34 North American elections since 2007, but both he and Braid said the Liberals’ shock majority in B.C. is forcing them to revisit some of their most basic assumptions.

“The overall picture of polling is still a positive story,” Braid said. “B.C and Alberta [in 2012] both stick out like giant asterisks, but the U.S. election, the last federal election, most of them have been pretty good.”

Sixteen-year-old Dominic De Lagiraudais left his mother’s home on April 21 after having a fight about her rules.

Marie De Lagiraudais said her son is an avid fan of Canadian reality show Survivorman, and initially entered the woods near the Port Coquitlam River with a survival pack he purchased online.

When he didn’t return, police began an extensive ground search. The media were alerted and a Facebook page popped up with public pleas for information from his friends and family.

Dominic, however, claims he was blissfully unaware of the search effort, according to his mother. Marie said he made his way throughout the Lower Mainland and to Vancouver Island, where he was befriended and given food by strangers all along the way.

At some point, while working on a wood carving, he cut his hand badly and took himself to Vancouver General Hospital, where he received 15 to 20 stitches. Although he had to show his birth certificate to get care, Marie says the hospital never clued in that he was a missing person.

At another point, when he was sleeping on a beach, she said Dominic told her he awoke to find a bear rifling through his things — but thankfully escaped the encounter unscathed.

After eventually signing into Facebook, Dominic realized how worried his friends and family were and returned home on Tuesday afternoon.

Marie said police have spoken with him and made him aware that his adventure caused undue stress to everyone involved, and she is confident he will never leave home again without making regular contact with her.

But that was a full 24 hours before the polls closed on Tuesday. Reached by phone late Tuesday night at his home in Victoria, he was in utter disbelief.

“In my entire career, I can’t recall such an unexpected upset victory,” he said.

“The pollsters are going to have to do an examination, because they all pointed in one general direction and they’ve all been so wrong.”

He said there must be something wrong with their methodology, since nearly all polls these days are the product of voluntary online surveys, meaning no margin of error can be assigned.

After trailing in the polls for months, he said Premier Christy Clark miraculously, almost single-handedly managed to find the reset button.

“The campaign made a big difference and the kind of energy she showed and that single-minded focus on the economy enabled her to reset things for the Liberal Party,” he said.

So what is next for the Liberals?

“I can’t help thinking that given the hammering they’ve been taking about how the deficit has increased under their watch, that there might be more pressure on them to contain the budget,” Ruff said. “They’re still not clear on how they’re going to get the numbers that they’ve presented.”

And what about the NDP? Suddenly, all the media’s pre-election talk about the so-called “8:01″ club to depose Clark the minute after the polls closed has been flipped on its head. Will the NDP’s dismay turn into a blame game and call for Adrian Dix to step down as party leader?

“The party has got to recover from the shock before it can get its head around that question,” Ruff said.

In a victory that will come as small comfort to NDP supporters, Eby managed to unseat the Premier in her own riding — a feat he almost accomplished in the last byelection when he lost to her by just 564 votes.

“There’s no doubt that there will be a powerful message sent if the Premier does not win her own seat,” Eby said just before 11 p.m., when the race was still too close to call.

“That message is mostly, I imagine, around the issues of the environment. That was a critically important issue in this riding — pipelines and an increase in tanker traffic — and the Premier’s total abdication of the issue of climate change and B.C.’s responsibility. I hope she takes that seriously.”

University of Victoria political science professor emeritus Norman Ruff said a Liberal will have to step down in a relatively safe riding to allow Clark to win a seat, and he expects there might be some political infighting over that.

Asked if he could recall the last time a prominent leader had won an election but lost their seat, Ruff, a 40-year veteran political scholar, had to scan his encyclopedic library of Canadian history.

“I can’t think of one in B.C.,” he said. “I looked it up, and [William Lyon] MacKenzie King in ’25 and ’45, lost his seat as Prime Minister of Canada, and then got Liberal members to resign so he could get a seat.”

As for who will draw the short straw — that’s the question that will be on everyone’s lips Wednesday.

In addition to the usual bounty of organic veggies and artisan eats, Trout Lake market coordinator Laura Smith said May is the perfect time to dig up some new garden supplies.

“It’s our garden month all May, and we have our garden festival May 25, where we specially feature growers who are bringing in things like garden baskets, shrubs, Japanese maples, and flowers,” she said.

“We’ll also have speakers’ series and lots of kids’ events.”

The Kitsilano market boasts some of the city’s best food trucks, like JJ’s Trucketeria, which was voted everyone’s favourite last year thanks to its vegan Asian fusion fare.

The Kits market also brings out renowned Indian food guru Vij’s, and Crêperie La Bohème, which you won’t find anywhere else.

The Trout Lake Farmers Market opens on Saturday, and will return every Saturday until Oct. 19 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Kitsilano Farmers Market, next to the Kitsilano Community Centre, will open every Sunday until Oct. 20 from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m.

For more information, visit eatlocal.org.