Wag The Dog

In the well-done satirical film Wag the Dog, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman play characters retained by the President of the United States to help with some bad press.

To aid the president, the characters create a fake war and a fake hero. The hero they fake - played by Woody Harrelson - is an unlikely number who left to his own devices would have achieved very little. More than this, the fake hero is in fact a very sick man, and his elevation into the realm of public scrutiny threatens to take down the whole house of cards. 

Does this sound familiar?

The machine behind the Progressive Conservatives lent a big hand to the Ford campaign for Mayor three years ago. They saw in him a likeable guy with a strong popular appeal. In the fake war against the gravy train, Rob Ford was their PC hero.

Left to his own devices, it is hard to imagine that Rob could achieve leading the 6th largest government in the country. Forget the substance abuse and the anger management problems. Who else among political leaders needs his big brother to hold his hand when he talks to the CBC?

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This post is coming to you early because, in the vale of shame where every Torontonian currently dwells, the restorative powers of volunteering have a strong appeal. I'll be up early tomorrow to help clean up the Allan Gardens. 

I leave you with a photo taken on the way to the Wheat Sheaf Tavern after our visit to the food bank last week. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Sometimes It's Good To Be Boss...

At 2:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, fifteen comfortably dressed and well-fed-looking people walked into the Fort York Food Bank on Dundas Street West in Toronto. They looked a little out of place and some of them may have felt so. One of them walked purposefully to the back of the shop and made some enquiries. 

Before long, these fifteen people were folding eggs three at a time into newsprint sheets...

or portioning day old buns and bread loaves into bags....

or breaking down cardboard boxes...

or unpacking bags of carrots, potatoes and beets into crates...

or sorting and shelving packaged food.

The Fort York Food bank is one of the largest agencies of the Daily Bread Food Bank. It provides food and a suite of other services to the 180-200 people who walk through its doors every day.

The food the fifteen people separated, sorted and packaged for two hours will all be more-or-less gone within the next 24 hours.

This is how my exceptional team and I spent our "Branch Day." 

Thanks for reading!  Have a great week!

Karen

Jennifer?

The title of today's post is the question a young woman asked me last Saturday just after I'd stepped through the sliding glass doors to the Loblaws at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was making my way through the mob of people who were either waiting to order something at the deli or shopping for flowers or grabbing a shopping cart or stepping onto the escalator up to the liquor store or entering or leaving the store. 

MLG Loblaws is a nice place but I think they could have spent a bit more time thinking about crowd flow.

Anyway. I step in the door, look over to see if there are any small shopping carts and the face of an absolutely not familiar-looking young woman emerges from the anonymous hubbub of the crowd. She's looking right at me, so I smile because why on earth wouldn't I. Her eyes lock onto mine. I see that she seems to recognize me. I get that much-more-frequent-these-days feeling of slight panic as I search for information in my brain to help me know who this young woman is.

My panic is completely diffused by her question "Jennifer?" and I smile more broadly. "No, not Jennifer," I say. The young woman is thunderstruck. "Oh my God," she says, "You look exactly like her."

Sadly, I failed to act on this. True dopplegangers are hard to come by and come in handy. I should have asked for Jennifer's number.

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I flew to Washington this week. Because I persist in packing illegal-sized liquids, I have to check my luggage (and pay an additional $25 - for which I apologize to Ontario taxpayers). 

I needed to go to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the Air Quality Committee - an august body operating under the auspices of the Canada-US Air Quality Agreement. The AQA has been around for a long time and the international cooperation under it has been remarkably successful, and not just because the competition - action on climate change or protecting the Great Lakes, say - is so weak. Things are moving along so well in fact that there really wasn't much to talk about. 

The fact that we had little to say notwithstanding, I spent my 22 hours in Washington DC -- one of America's most beautiful and interesting cities -- inside one of a cab, the hotel where I was staying, or the room where the meeting was held. The only photo I took was of this card I found in my luggage:

A very polite notice -- in both official languages -- telling me that after I'd sent my bag on its way along the belt conveyor, someone with the Screening Officer Number of 5279, and with a closed circuit television as a witness, had rummaged through my luggage.

Stay safe! Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

I'd Rather Talk About Something Else, Thanks

Let's just get this out of the way now: yes, the video showing Rob Ford smoking *something* has been brought to light by virtue of the hard work and expert investigative skills of Toronto's finest. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to turn to more pressing matters along the lines of my mother's change hoarding habits, or the privileged lives of feral cats, or what is the most popular topic on this blog: my dad.

Accupressure for Loiterers

During the Mike Harris years, a ten-story former government building on the south-east corner of the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley was converted into a condo. The street-level retail space is occupied by the bank that assures us that we're richer than we think. 

The condo conversion included cladding the building exterior with slabs of polished granite, even along the surface of the exterior ledge under the first floor windows. For many years this slick smooth ledge afforded the tired, homeless and incapacitated a place to hang out, sleep and do other things.

Recently, workmen installed bumpy metal strips on the ledge. 
  

The ledge, just after installation.

The ledge, the very next day.

More About Smelly Trees

A couple of years ago, cutting across the Allan Gardens on my way home, I smelled something truly godawful just north and west of the south-east corner of the park. I assumed that someone had taken a dump in a flower bed. The horrible stench subsided eventually and, for another year, I did not encounter it again. But, the next fall, the horrible stink came back.

Yes, I picked this ginkgo nut up to arrange this shot; yes, my hands smelled very bad.

Driven to the Internet to test a hunch about a tree growing close to the path at that end of the Gardens, I learned that the fruit of female ginkgo trees comes encased in pulpy flesh that, depending on an individual's olfactory, smells like vomit, farts, rancid butter or poo. Some people complain about this; some cities cut the trees down; in Toronto, people carefully search among the grass and fallen leaves below the trees and take the fruit - a delicacy and a medicine - home.

The Fate of the Allan Gardens Agave Spike

The stalk is gone; the glass pane repaired; the fate of the bulbils unknown. Come back in 70 years and we can talk again.

My last shot of the spike.

One week later.

Now, This Guy Probably Did Lose His Job

Around 6:00 p.m. on Thursday night, I was walking south along the highrise canyon on Bay Street just south of Wellesley. It was warm, but very windy. I could hear a loud, strange sound which I could not immediately place, but it reminded me of the noise a hoist rope makes when the wind drives it against a flag pole. It was dark, so I couldn't really place the noise, but I guessed it had something to do with the window-washing platform resting on the sidewalk at the foot of a highrise. It was an incredible racket and I wondered if anyone was going to do something about it.

Just behind the blue car: the window washing platform. You can also just barely see the rope.

The next morning I confirmed what I had supposed. Someone had lowered the window washing platform from the roof fifty stories above and left it there so that the ropes, in the high winds that blew all night, could lash against the side of the building. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen