In the space of two hours and three city blocks, I walked past and / or was passed by three, count 'em, three protests.
In front of Maple Leaf Gardens, Ontario teachers protested Bill 115, the unilateral deal imposed upon them by the sitting Liberal government.
In the middle of Allan Gardens, a couple of hundred people gathered to protest windfarms, drawn, I imagine, as the teachers were by the presence of the Liberal party leadership convention going on in Maple Leaf Gardens.
Probably for the same reason, an Ontario Coalition Against Poverty parade just passed by my front door.
Darn those Liberals. And woe betide the winner of today's convention.
See photos.
Karen
Saturday, January 26, 2013
Investment Adventures
For the fourth time now, a yoga studio that I frequent has closed its doors. Eka yoga (six months in business), Buddha Body Yoga (three years in business), Rainbow Body yoga (one year), and before these Jivamukti Yoga Toronto (four years), have all been shuttered.
I refuse to see a pattern here.
It's not like there's no successful yoga studios in Toronto. In fact, on Yonge Street there are three very successful establishments within five blocks of each other, four if you extend your search by another three blocks. I'm just having a bit of trouble finding one that both works for me and works in this economy.
There actually is a connection between this week's post's title and my unending struggle to find a financially vibrant and close-to-home yoga studio. It's money. And expectations. As in, if you put money into something (a yoga studio, say), you may not always get what you expected.
About a year ago, a friend of mine directed me to the cloud-start up-funding site called Kickstarter. If you've never heard of it, you should check it out. Anyway, my friend wanted to me to take a look at a project called Somewhere Between, a documentary by a Los Angeles filmmaker about Chinese girls who have been adopted by people who don't live in China and are not Chinese. The filmmaker was trying to raise $80,000 to cover the cost of distributing her movie. People who wanted to help her raise this money had a range of options, including the one I picked, which was to send her about $45 US, in return for which I would receive a DVD copy of the film and have my name appear somewhere on their Facebook page - by July 2012.
While I was on the Kickstarter site thinking about supporting the movie, another project looking for funding caught my eye. A group of MIT engineers were promoting a project called Air Quality Egg, which they described as "a community-led air quality sensing network that gives people a way to participate in the conversation about air quality." For reasons I hope I don't need to go into, I found this notion hugely appealing. So I sent these guys $120 on their promise that they would send me my very own fully operational air egg by March 2012.
In case you're wondering how effective cloud funding is, Somewhere Between was hoping to raise $80K; they raised more than $100K. The Air Egg folks put out their plea for $40K and raised $100K more than that.
In case you're also wondering if I ever saw anything for my money, yes, about a year later, I did. First of all, my Air Egg showed up at work (which was the address I'd given because I can't receive parcels at my home address) and a few days later, I received my DVD.
Some months before these happy returns on my investments, I had wondered aloud to Bruce how much longer Kickstarter can expect to do well if investors have experiences such as mine seemed at the time, where two out of two volleys of cash into the void appeared to be coming up empty.
When both of the promised articles showed up within one week of each other, it was Bruce's turn to wonder aloud if Kickstarter might not have its own enforcers to make sure people who promise to deliver to investors on their site actually do.
Whatever the case, my happiest moment as the proud new owner of my very own Air Egg was reading the letter that shipped with the equipment. It said, in part, that there was absolutely no warranty on the stuff that had been shipped and, by the way, the Egg contains substances found to be carcinogenic by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Anybody wanna buy an Egg?
Have a great week!
Karen
I refuse to see a pattern here.
It's not like there's no successful yoga studios in Toronto. In fact, on Yonge Street there are three very successful establishments within five blocks of each other, four if you extend your search by another three blocks. I'm just having a bit of trouble finding one that both works for me and works in this economy.
There actually is a connection between this week's post's title and my unending struggle to find a financially vibrant and close-to-home yoga studio. It's money. And expectations. As in, if you put money into something (a yoga studio, say), you may not always get what you expected.
About a year ago, a friend of mine directed me to the cloud-start up-funding site called Kickstarter. If you've never heard of it, you should check it out. Anyway, my friend wanted to me to take a look at a project called Somewhere Between, a documentary by a Los Angeles filmmaker about Chinese girls who have been adopted by people who don't live in China and are not Chinese. The filmmaker was trying to raise $80,000 to cover the cost of distributing her movie. People who wanted to help her raise this money had a range of options, including the one I picked, which was to send her about $45 US, in return for which I would receive a DVD copy of the film and have my name appear somewhere on their Facebook page - by July 2012.
While I was on the Kickstarter site thinking about supporting the movie, another project looking for funding caught my eye. A group of MIT engineers were promoting a project called Air Quality Egg, which they described as "a community-led air quality sensing network that gives people a way to participate in the conversation about air quality." For reasons I hope I don't need to go into, I found this notion hugely appealing. So I sent these guys $120 on their promise that they would send me my very own fully operational air egg by March 2012.
In case you're wondering how effective cloud funding is, Somewhere Between was hoping to raise $80K; they raised more than $100K. The Air Egg folks put out their plea for $40K and raised $100K more than that.
In case you're also wondering if I ever saw anything for my money, yes, about a year later, I did. First of all, my Air Egg showed up at work (which was the address I'd given because I can't receive parcels at my home address) and a few days later, I received my DVD.
Some months before these happy returns on my investments, I had wondered aloud to Bruce how much longer Kickstarter can expect to do well if investors have experiences such as mine seemed at the time, where two out of two volleys of cash into the void appeared to be coming up empty.
When both of the promised articles showed up within one week of each other, it was Bruce's turn to wonder aloud if Kickstarter might not have its own enforcers to make sure people who promise to deliver to investors on their site actually do.
Whatever the case, my happiest moment as the proud new owner of my very own Air Egg was reading the letter that shipped with the equipment. It said, in part, that there was absolutely no warranty on the stuff that had been shipped and, by the way, the Egg contains substances found to be carcinogenic by the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Anybody wanna buy an Egg?
Toronto's Air quality looks pretty good after all. |
Karen
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Homo Distractus
In a line of work related to my own, experts talk about climate change and say that we're engaged in an uncontrolled experiment - dumping gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, changing its composition and, fundamentally, our world.
If you Google "uncontrolled experiment" you'll find that there are lots of experts talking about all kinds of uncontrolled experiments: in kinds of therapy, for example, or education.
I'm no expert, but I've noticed what might be called an uncontrolled experiment in how people are learning how to communicate.
Let me explain. When I was a young person, I would sometimes get a bit annoyed at the little old ladies walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They were going much more slowly than I was, and they really didn't seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings.
Nowadays, I get a bit annoyed at teens and twenty-somethings walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They are also going much more slowly than I am and they neither seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings. But it is not great age that slows their steps and impairs their senses. It's their goddam iPhone, or MP3 player or some other glowing doodad they can't take their eyes off of.
These doodads are more than just a source of music or entertainment. They are some kind of communication appendage, a gizmo so distracting and attractive that they are becoming how their users communicate.
This may seem silly. Of course people use their iPhones to communicate. Duh, that's what they're for. I guess my point is that people have lots of ways to communicate - with their voices, their hands, their faces, their body language, but now they use these things less and their glowing doodads more.
In the age-old wisdom, if you don't use it, you lose it.
There was a recent example of what happens when the glowing doodads are lost.
Earlier this week, internet services provided by Rogers winked out for a couple of hours in parts of eastern Canada. It was such a major event, CBC ran a bit on how being cut off from the Internet disconcerts folks.
The most interesting factoid in the CBC bit was the finding from a Pew study that university students freaked out when asked not to use the Internet... for a day.
Social media - the medium of the young - is a major movement of our age, has connected and galvanized millions, and... all you need is a power outage (or the idea to disconnect for a day) and no one has a way to say anything.
I am completely aware of the fact that I am using the Internet at this very moment to communicate these thoughts. And I'm not the person who created the term homo distractus (evidently, this guy is). But the single most powerful thing people do is communicate and, in a way, it is an experiment to have an entire (global) generation so focused on a communications tool at once so obsessively attractive and so fragile.
This picture, however, is worth a thousand words. This cat does not care about the Internet.
Have a great week!
Karen
If you Google "uncontrolled experiment" you'll find that there are lots of experts talking about all kinds of uncontrolled experiments: in kinds of therapy, for example, or education.
I'm no expert, but I've noticed what might be called an uncontrolled experiment in how people are learning how to communicate.
Let me explain. When I was a young person, I would sometimes get a bit annoyed at the little old ladies walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They were going much more slowly than I was, and they really didn't seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings.
Nowadays, I get a bit annoyed at teens and twenty-somethings walking on the sidewalk in front of me. They are also going much more slowly than I am and they neither seem to be fully engaged with their surroundings. But it is not great age that slows their steps and impairs their senses. It's their goddam iPhone, or MP3 player or some other glowing doodad they can't take their eyes off of.
These doodads are more than just a source of music or entertainment. They are some kind of communication appendage, a gizmo so distracting and attractive that they are becoming how their users communicate.
This may seem silly. Of course people use their iPhones to communicate. Duh, that's what they're for. I guess my point is that people have lots of ways to communicate - with their voices, their hands, their faces, their body language, but now they use these things less and their glowing doodads more.
In the age-old wisdom, if you don't use it, you lose it.
There was a recent example of what happens when the glowing doodads are lost.
Earlier this week, internet services provided by Rogers winked out for a couple of hours in parts of eastern Canada. It was such a major event, CBC ran a bit on how being cut off from the Internet disconcerts folks.
The most interesting factoid in the CBC bit was the finding from a Pew study that university students freaked out when asked not to use the Internet... for a day.
Social media - the medium of the young - is a major movement of our age, has connected and galvanized millions, and... all you need is a power outage (or the idea to disconnect for a day) and no one has a way to say anything.
I am completely aware of the fact that I am using the Internet at this very moment to communicate these thoughts. And I'm not the person who created the term homo distractus (evidently, this guy is). But the single most powerful thing people do is communicate and, in a way, it is an experiment to have an entire (global) generation so focused on a communications tool at once so obsessively attractive and so fragile.
This picture, however, is worth a thousand words. This cat does not care about the Internet.
Have a great week!
Karen
Monday, January 7, 2013
Holiday Retrospective
I'm writing this on January 7, so it's already too late to make New Year's resolutions or predictions about what the year ahead will bring.
But, thanks to Peter Jackson's The Hobbit I have a way to express my feelings about the holiday season just past.
The holidays, like Jackson's movie, are warmly enjoyable when they stick to their source material (family, friends, light-filled celebration in the darkest time of the year, for example, or the exchange between Bilbo and Gandalf that starts the story) but tedious and insufferable when they stray into excessive elaboration (fifteen-minute-long CGI-festooned battle scenes with improbable numbers of orcs, say, or seventeen giant meals in a row).
And they're both too long.
And they're returning next year.
On the up side, we have some snow in Toronto now, and my across-the-way neighbour took these pictures of the little hemlock tree in my back yard.
I decorated the tree for the enjoyment of those banished to the out of doors to smoke at the open house I held on December 28.
I had billed the event as "keeping in shape for the holidays," proposing that it had perhaps been hours or days since those invited had had too much to eat and drink.
Recalling what I just said about the insufferable elaborations of the season, my event was either part of the worst or part of the best. Because it was my party, I'll say it was the latter. Many friends and neighbours attended and it was a lot of fun.
I hold these shindigs rarely, and I like to keep track of the lessons learned. It's my New Years tribute to my readers (all 15 of you) that I share these lessons.
For a mid-afternoon (2 p.m. to 6 p.m.) open house with about 35 people attending,
- ten bottles of wine, five white and five red are just about right, noting that some people will arrive with bottles of their own
- a large pitcher of ice water constantly refilled is also a good idea
- one or two people will prefer spirits, so put some brandy or scotch or vodka out
- one bag of ice is enough
- one litre of fruit juice is tonnes (unless someone brings their kids; then you need two)
- one bottle of soda water is also enough
- make about six cups of coffee
- buy about half as much soft cheese as you think you need
- two long loaves of crusty bread and one big box of President's Choice crackers for cheese are enough
- one small head of each of cauliflower and broccoli is more than enough
- ditto one large bunch of grapes and one box of grape tomatoes
Because I read it in a recipe, I blanched the broccoli and cauliflower I set out. This appears to have been a good idea. They disappeared.
On my buffet table, the homemade guacamole, onion dip (just sour cream and chopped scallions) and salsa were consumed in their entirety (about two cups of each). Only the store-bought dip (hummus) had any left over.
If you provide your 35 guests with all of the above, you don't need to bother with mixed nuts but chocolate will still be popular.
On my buffet table, the homemade guacamole, onion dip (just sour cream and chopped scallions) and salsa were consumed in their entirety (about two cups of each). Only the store-bought dip (hummus) had any left over.
If you provide your 35 guests with all of the above, you don't need to bother with mixed nuts but chocolate will still be popular.
I tried a new place to cater some of the food, and will definitely use them again. Subscribers in Toronto looking for truly excellent samosas and other Indian treats should not hesitate to contact Tiffinday. This is not a restaurant, but a service, as they have in India, that will bring you a hot lunch in a reusable metal tin called a tiffin. They also catered over the holidays, but that is not their usual business.
Those are all my lessons. Now they belong to you, too.
Happy New Year!
Karen
Those are all my lessons. Now they belong to you, too.
Happy New Year!
Karen
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