Punchline Mayor

Not long ago I paid cash on the barrel head for a year's membership at a new (and I hope financially healthy) yoga studio. The studio is a good half hour by foot north of where I live, and about fifteen minutes north of where I work.

My route to and from the studio takes me past the corner of Park Road and Church Street, where the Christadelphians have built a small church and the City of Toronto has established a small park called Asquith Green.

Sometimes, while I'm walking, I play with similes in my head. One such figure of speech a long time brewing is "as woebegone as a Christmas decoration in January" and as the weeks after the New Year have stretched into months, and the Christmas decorations have still not been removed, the phrase has changed.

And I can't decide which is more woebegone.



This Christmas decoration in Asquith Green in March....

Or the jaunty baubles still hanging in my backyard in April ....















Maybe there's another simile: "as desperate a hold out as the last patch of snow in April..." 

There has to be one for Rob Ford...

On March 24, Bruce and I attended the last Toronto performance of Mary Walsh's one-woman show Dancing With Rage. We thought we were pretty lucky when I ordered tickets on Friday night for the Sunday matinee and managed to get two seats five rows back from the stage. But our luck might have been the result of the reviews. Mary Walsh is a great performer and one of the funniest people alive, but weak material won't save you, no matter who you are. 

The show started strong with Mary dressed as Miss Eulalie coming down the theatre aisle calling out a staccato series of jokes about Stephen Harper, Patrick Braseau and other newsworthy types, but she didn't even have to drop a name to get the biggest laugh. All she had to say was "your mayor."

There must be a simile in there somewhere: 

• as insert something as Rob Ford, or, alternatively, 
• Rob Ford is as insert something as an insert something else

Mull that over while you enjoy your Easter chocolate and have a great week!

Karen

A Question

So what would change, do you think, if a middle-aged white man came back from the dead and said, "It's true. He who dies with the most toys actually does win"?

Hmmmmmm.

This past week, Bruce and I celebrated our (3)4th anniversary by checking out the Revealing the Early Renaissance show at the AGO. This was a rare night out for us frugal early-to-bed-early-to-risers. But Bruce had gotten me an AGO membership for my birthday, so, technically, admission was free.

The show was completely comprised of the fourteenth century Florence version of toys: lavish, stunning, exquisite and, for the most part, small pieces of devotional artwork commissioned by the burgeoning Christian middle class of that city, recently grown rich on the textile trade. 

Worried that their wealth might turn Heaven's Door into something smaller than the eye of a needle, these good merchants paid quite a lot of money for gorgeously wrought triptychs and altar pieces and fabulous illuminated manuscripts. Workshops headed up by famous artists churned these pieces out in vast profusion.

Over the next seven centuries, these beautiful treasures were wrenched from their original installations (many of the pieces still bore signs of forcible removal), cut up (manuscript illuminations removed from their pages), chopped up (a large crucifix, for example, had its arms removed) and scattered to the four winds.

Then someone associated with the Getty Museum in Los Angles started a painstaking endeavour to find these pieces and bring them back together. Throughout the galleries, descriptions of provenance often included a note that the panels, or pages from the manuscript, were together again for the first time in centuries. 

Five rooms of this pretty stuff evokes feelings of appreciation for the craftsmanship, and a degree of marvel at the longevity of some of the fragile materials. But not devotion. But that could just be me.

The most thrilling moment for me was when one of the AGO volunteers stepped up and held out for me to touch a 700-year-old sheet of parchment. The sheet had musical notations on it and some script. It was big - maybe eleven inches by seventeen - and did I mention it was about 700 years old? 

I held the piece of processed calf gut in my hands and caught a sensation - like looking into a still pool and sensing depths you can't see - of the time since the parchment had been a young cow, munching grass on a hillside above the prosperous post-Medieval settlement of Florence.

Have a great week!

Karen





     

Shopping

I made a lot of purchases this past week.

I bought my very first e-book. I figured after reading all about Mike Moss' book -- Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us -- I should probably try it on for myself.

As books go, it's a well-done series of chapters written so as to easily be excerpted for publication elsewhere. Each chapter dwells, with slight variations, on the same thing: some man (and once in a rare while a woman) worked for some food giant - Kraft, General Mills, Nestle - and, while being the best company executive possible, struggled with, scientifically studied or revelled in the overwhelming truth that processed food is not good for people and sales must grow.

None of the men interviewed still ate the food their companies made. Some never ate it.  

Having pounded home the point about the terrible health and social costs of the combined impacts of convenience food and capitalism, Moss' last two sentences say more than the whole rest of the book: 

"After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much to eat."

Ain't that the truth.  

When I shop for groceries, here's a list of what I might decide to buy:

• salad greens
• grape tomatoes
• fresh vegetables like mushrooms, celery, carrots 
• fresh bread
• fresh meat
• basmati rice
• uncooked pasta 
• butter / Becel
• eggs

and so on. You get the idea.

When Bruce shops for groceries, all on his own without a list from me, here's what he might decide to buy:

• tostitos 
• salsa
• snack crackers 
• cookies

and so on. You get the idea.

I shop for the meals I make. Bruce shops for the snacks in between the meals. It works. So long as there's two of us.

Grocery shopping is really the only kind of shopping I even halfway enjoy and that's probably because I do it frequently and the stakes are comparatively low. 

Shopping mob at Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens

But, mostly, I dislike shopping and I dislike shopping for shoes the most. Maybe I feel this way because women's shoes are marketed as if they were junk food.

At any rate, one day this past week while I sat bored and inattentive during the second hour of a three-hour-long teleconference, I absent-mindedly took off my shoe and looked at the sole.

And then I knew I needed a new pair of shoes. 

Here they are: 

These are beautiful Italian suede loafers with maybe a thousand rhinestones appliqued to each shoe.

Of course I decided to buy two pairs.

Wouldn't you?

Have a great week!

Karen









  

Scones and Motivation

Mostly to make a joke about Thanksgiving last year, I wrote about Dan Pink and his short video on motivation: mastery * autonomy * purpose.

This past week, I watched another Dan Pink video, this time a TED Talk from 2009, on the same topic.

The video was played as part of a special meeting some of the staff had developed for the benefit of the rest of the staff. One of them noted that the meeting was itself a good example of autonomy and purpose in the workplace. 

I baked some scones for the meeting, to contribute to the overall theme. 

I got up early that morning to do the baking, and, as I zested and juiced the orange, measured and mixed the other ingredients, kneaded (ever so slightly) the dough, rolled it out and cut it into small pieces, these are the thoughts that went through my mind:

CBC has run stories (the Globe and Mail has, too) about how processed food is very bad for people. There is 'way too much salt in it, 'way too much sugar. And writers researching the food industry have been astonished to find that the food that is so bad for us is also scientifically designed so that people can't stop eating it. 

What was once solely the realm of salted peanuts is now a global nightmare of market behemoths who, to make a buck, sell products designed to make people consume far past the point of what is good for them, even to consume far past the point when their own brains tell them to stop eating. The obesity epidemic is the evidence of how good these guys are at their jobs.

I don't think Dan Pink would be surprised by this. In his video, he observes that when money is the only motivator, bad things tend to happen. Pink uses as an example the banking crisis of 2009. If he were to refresh his evidence, maybe he would point to the work of the person who blew the cover off the sugar industry, Cristin Kearns Couzens, and the New York Times writer, Michael Moss, who has published a book on how profit-seeking food conglomerates are destroying people's health. 

As the scones baked, I mulled over the aggressive imperatives of the food industry I read about in the media. I wondered what the difference was between what I was doing and what Nabisco does.

Obviously the difference is my motivation. I bake scones because people like to eat them, not because I want to make money.  But that doesn't mean that Dan Pink is right about everything. 

Pink's 2009 Ted talk repeats the phrase "there's a mismatch between what science knows and what business does." Pink means that scientific studies have shown people are not always motivated by money. 

But, the science of turning people into compulsive consumers of processed food means the opposite is also true: there is sometimes a perfect match between what science knows and what business does. 

And no one's more motivated than an addict.

**************************************************  

This week's picture has no connection to the text above. That's me sitting on the couch with my book, in what I think is my grandmother's house in Vancouver, British Columbia, circa November, 1961, a couple of months past my fourth birthday. The man in the middle is my uncle Roddy; the man on the left is my dad, Bill.

Have a great week!

Karen

Looking for Trouble

I took this picture of a wasp's nest (look carefully at the centre of the shot) in a big old tree at the southern edge of the Allan Gardens late in the afternoon on the last day of February.  

The little miracle that may be easy to miss in the photo is that it is late afternoon, and there's still enough light to take pictures.

While I am heartily weary of winter, I love February for this reason: I can feel the days getting longer. 

But it is not particularly the promise of summer in the longer days that makes me glad. Summer around here is hot, the air quality terrible and, come August, the wasps have taken over. The nest in the picture is just one of many I've seen in the bare trees this winter. I regard them with fear and foreboding.

But, Wikipedia says the nests are abandoned. Wasp colonies die off; the last great act of the mortal queen is to create some fertile males and females who then mate. The males die and the fertilized females look for a safe spot to hibernate for the winter. In spring, the baby queens start new nests, using the male seed stored in their bodies to birth thousands of new wasps.

Another miracle, I guess.

Have a great week!

Karen