It seems like every few months or so we get a little blurb by one of the resident asshole scribes in The Georgia Straight or The Nerve about how the uptight local building inspectors are keeping us all from having a good time with their stupid rules about overcrowding in clubs.

Well, it looks like we’re not the only city with this problem. Civic officials in Chicago evidently don’t know how to party either, ordering the E2 nightclub not to use its second floor because it violated a number of buiding code regulations. The owners of E2, apparently concerned about their town wearing a ‘No Fun City’ label, decided to defy the order, and in a stampede to the exits---triggered after a few shots of pepper spray we’re fired---twenty-one clubgoers are now dead.

It will be interesting to see whether our own oxygen-deprived music press learn anything from this.

I’m not holding my breath.