Notice

In my 'hood, every other block or so, you see signs like the one above. This particular sign is at the intersection of Carlton and Yonge Streets, on the site of a building with a distinctive mid-century-era facade since obscured by advertising. You can see it next to the brightly illuminated Toronto Hydro building in the photo below, taken in February/March 1967.

The new 73-storey structure is going up across Yonge Street from another giant tower currently under construction and is one block north of the newly-built Aura tower, which is, for the time being, the tallest residential condominium in Toronto. That will change when a 96-storey tower, kitty corner to the Aura at the intersection of Yonge and Gerrard, is built. There's also a new tower going up one block north of the 73-storey structure, and another a block north of that. A seventh towering monolith is slated for development just north of the one currently under construction across the street from 2 Carlton. 

If each of these new towers holds about twelve hundred  people, that's 8,400 new people added to a four-block stretch of Yonge Street.

If all these people want to get around by car, the streets may get a bit congested. And that may explain the surmise in the sign below, that, even though only 2% of Torontonians currently ride their bike or walk to work, all of that is about to change.

Also Noticed

Early one Saturday morning, on my way to the gym, I saw this on the steps leading to the courtyard of the condo complex we live in.

Leaving behind something like a hidden object puzzle (can you find the sock, the hairbrush, the apple, the five syringes?), a local had strewn the contents of their bag, and their bag, on the steps.

This is not trash. People don't pick up litter in my neighbourhood, but by the time I returned home, all the pieces, and the bag, were gone. 

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

Karen




  

Joy

I think I was in the Allan Gardens when I heard two people wish one another a “Happy December," an interesting avoidance of the whole denominational aspect of what people are celebrating this time of year.

I was definitely in the Allan Gardens, along with dozens if not hundreds of others, when I enjoyed the seasonal display in the fine old greenhouse.

On that day, through some arrangement of Toronto Parks and Recreation (I imagine) people from all over the city who had come to see the greenhouse could also take a sleigh ride through the unsnowy park.

Two draught horses and a grumpy driver with a wagon full of Muslim women having the time of their lives.

So here’s my version of “Happy December’

"May this season bring you the joy you’d feel on the very first sleigh ride of your life."

Have a Happy New Year!

Karen

Company

Visiting us last week: Lester (the red one) and Golda;
they brought along their humans, our friends Sylvia and Jay 

People who know me through LinkedIn heard recently that I have a "new job." Not the outcome of an exhilarating job competition or fortifying promotion, my new job is the result of a reorganization. I now have a smaller team and a less clear mandate. Neither of these things are terribly problematic. And, due to the reorganization and a few other shifts, I associate now with a whole slew of colleagues who have no recollection nor visual memory of me disabled by osteoarthritis. 

The thing I like best about this is I don't have to answer questions - like I do from colleagues who do recall my days with a cane - about my mobility. For all the new batch know, I was always as I am now.

Which is really what this post is about. I'm well past recovering from the operation and am now in the realm of feeling like I did before the osteoarthritis kicked in. This does not mean my leg is good as new. It will never be quite the same again. I have to be careful to avoid mystery injuries like the one I gave myself just before we went to Italy. But it does mean that I have the strength, stamina and energy levels I have not had since before January 2015.

Which means my Saturdays can include more than just blogging and sitting on the couch consuming unhealthy amounts of Netflix.

Today I've got company coming for lunch and tonight we're going out for dinner with friends. Then I'll need to sleep.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ephemera

Queens Park Art: Harold Town

Along with distinctive pieces of large art out of doors, the MacDonald Block complex at Queens Park has pieces indoors of what was considered at the time the best the visual arts had to offer.

I walk by them every day.

MacDonald Block is slated for a massive multi-year renovation. The 50-year-old buildings will be gutted and rebuilt from the inside. 

I imagine someone has a plan for the careful removal and storage of these works. 

But, this is government, so maybe not.

I am unaccountably fond of these 70's remnants, so here are poorly lit, not always perpendicular shots of some of them. 

Just in case.

Turquoise glazed tile and terracotta boobs.

Geometric pattern in a technique reserved these days for billboards

Outside the cafeteria: mosaic with old Ontario Hydro logo, exploding planet and fish

Across from the Ministry of Transportation: the Stratford Festival

At the east end of the walkway between MacDonald and Whitney blocks: encased birds

Another blocky tree with triangular leaves, this time in metal

Perhaps the least dated-looking of the lot: fresh, contemporary, not falling apart.

Monumental ceramic by the Wellesley Street West doors: graveyard with avenging angel

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Sleepless

Problems with solutions: two solved puzzles. 

I'm having trouble sleeping these days. I can't really pin down when it started or why it's happening. 

Could be the trip to Italy knocked my circadian rhythm off kilter. Could be stress at work. Could be because I am so inexpressibly old.

The changes I have implemented to try and get more sleep: 

• remove caffeine from my life forever
• stop looking at a blue screen (like the one I'm looking at right now) for at least an hour before bed and
• don't drink any fluids for at least two hours before bedtime so I don't have to wake from dreams of fruitless searches for a bathroom.

These have kind of worked. I fall asleep OK but still wake up two or three times in the night. And I keep dreaming about that bathroom.

Happiness is a Sharp Knife

I was in Belleville last weekend visiting my sister and brother-in-law. On Saturday they took me to a shop selling kitchen supplies both for commercial operations and the public. I've been looking for a decent bread knife for a while now. This seemed a likely place. 

At the shop, I found a Heckels Twin bread knife at a good price and went to buy it. On the counter were a stack of Heckels Twin chef's knives, on sale for about a third of the MSRP, so I got one of those, too.

I have at home a collection of good knives, acquired over the years. I use them a lot and I thought, at least until I brought the new knives home, that I kept them sharp.

The new ones are scary sharp, practically atom-splitting sharp. Almost too sharp. My old knives (which I have sharpened) feel like I'm holding a tool; the new ones like I'm holding a weapon.

Thanks for reading!

Karen















  

Too Good To Be True

Caveat scavenger: consumer protection for curb-side mattress browsers

More Fake News

I've mentioned that, around the time I was in Italy, the subscriber numbers for this blog started unexpectedly to grow. I wondered who these people could be - even polled them as you may recall. I marvelled at the idea that, after five years of flawless obscurity, my blog had actually found a growing global audience.

Really?

Not really.

My search for answers took me to parts of the Blogger tool kit I did not know about. For example, I'd long thought I could not see who my subscribers were. 

In fact I can. 

All thirty of you. 

The rest, all those hundreds of "subscribers" - more than 800 by the time I discovered the lie - were fake outlook email addresses making it past the Blogger bot filter. 

No, You Shut Up

Readers may be aware of the story of the Wilfrid Laurier University student who had the temerity to bring a legitimate topic of debate to an appropriate academic forum, for which seditious behaviour she was cornered and bullied by three university officials, all men, one of whom came very close to accusing her of having committed a hate crime.

Good heavens. 

This all started with a tenured kook at the University of Toronto, who made himself famous by refusing to use gender neutral pronouns. He gave his profile a further boost by proposing to start a website calling out as corrupt and illegitimate any profs on the U of T faculty whose opinions and biases he believed to be on the wrong side of history. Several meetings with the Dean and others later, the tenured kook decided against putting up his website.

Meanwhile, back at WLU, the student played a portion of a TVO interview with the tenured kook talking about his aversion to using gender neutral pronouns. This was part of a class discussion of how the dominant discourse can marginalize, alienate and even do harm to those who don't fit within it. The tenured kook's interview was to show one perspective on the issue.

Shortly after this session, an anonymous complaint initiated the meeting where the student was cornered by the three men - further proof if you need it that the impulse to pick on women is still strong. 

The young woman had the presence of mind to record her meeting with the officials, and the strength of character to share the recording with the media, where the issue still echoes.

I get it. Anyone struggling to find identity and purpose in a world where even the plainest words - such as third person pronouns - exclude them could understandably want the dominant discourse to open just a crack and let them in. 

I also get that that a person might rankle at the idea, through their use of the plainest words - such as third person pronouns - that they are wilfully oppressing a vulnerable minority.

Where it all gets real human is where, either through an insane idea for a web page, or an over-the-top reaction to the exploration of an issue, one side becomes determined to shut the other down.

Then the sides are the same.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

    

Hangover

How Not to be Seen: Little Abbie blending in.

I feel a bit crummy. Dehydrated. Poisoned. Like I need to cut myself open and give my insides a rinse.

We had dinner out last night with a long-time friend. We first met him in 1986. He's the son of the man who was Bruce's boss at the time. 

The danger of having friends for so long is you want to always do what you have always done with them. Such as drink copiously while enjoying the conversation. So I had three pints of beer over the course of the meal. And a glass of whiskey after. And it was almost midnight before I went to bed.

Thirty years ago, this was business as usual. 

These days it's practically suicide.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Readers in the Toronto area may have caught the blaring headlines in the Toronto Star about the discovery of a report on mercury contamination on the site of the pulp mill in Dryden, Ontario. 

The Star strays from objective reporting in its assertions that the report was "secret" and "withheld" from First Nations communities. However, the story was very effective in distracting attention from the larger story that legislation has just been introduced to fund the clean up of the river.

Fun With Food

My sister was in town on Saturday. We went shopping to lay in provisions for clothing and skin care. For lunch, we went to Richmond Station, where they are now serving snowmen for dessert.

Two scoops of cardamon ice cream on a blob of honey mousse, decorated with intensely-flavoured coulis and chocolate sticks, dressed up with meringue snow balls and little men made out of soft ginger bread. Almost, but not quite, too cute to eat.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Urban Etiquette

Toronto is in a construction boom. Downtown, especially, has become a labyrinth of closed and narrowed streets to accommodate the staging required for 50, 60, 70 and 90-storey buildings under construction (about 130 in 2014).

Along with encroached street space are the pedestrian gangways. Just a bit more than two people wide most of the time, two-way foot traffic through these passages presents urbanites with new challenges for considerate behaviour.

For example, on rainy days it is considered polite to close your umbrella in the sheltered walkways. Also, unless you are on a fairway, it is always rude to use a golf umbrella.

More Signs of Progress

While still on the campaign trail, the current leader of the free world felt he needed to close the country's borders in response to the senseless gun deaths and injury of more than 30 people in San Bernadino in December 2015. He needed to find out, he said, what the hell is going on.  Fast forward to last week and the senseless slaughter of 26 people in Texas, and the now-president has it all figured out.

Finally...

The phrase has currency elsewhere, but I never heard "boil the ocean" before I joined the public service. A Google search shows it is most often used to suggest that the person saying it thinks the person hearing it has come up with an unrealistically ambitious approach to a project.

That's how we do things where I work.

Thanks for reading!

Karen



   

Bits and Pieces

Yes, the correct spelling is "shiny object"

It's been a miscellaneous kind of week. 

Margaret Wente is Broken

First thing that caught my eye was a CBC story about the many allegations of sexual harassment and assault by powerful men against vulnerable women in the entertainment industry.  Margaret Wente, the Globe and Mail's token libertarian/authoritarian idiot, provided her opinions on what behaviours women should reasonably tolerate from men. 

Long and short, unless the act truly is rape (and I'm sure she would weigh in on that given the opportunity), women should just wordlessly put up with being groped, stalked and harassed. She has her whole life, says Wente, and she's just fine. Absolutely she is.

How Climate Change Ruined Christmas

I was in HomeSense on Yonge Street looking for some mirrors that we've needed since we renovated our bedroom a year ago. The place was already all decked out for Christmas. I recalled how, in my early days as an adult, I would walk into a store like that and see it as a kind of treasure trove, full of wonder and potential. Now, I see a pile of crap no one needs destined for landfill, with unseen carbon footprints that will destroy us all.

DeCaffeinated

Through careful experimentation I can now confirm that my body has become 100% caffeine intolerant. For example, if I eat a small piece of dark chocolate at 1:00 p.m., my eyes will fly open at 1:00 a.m. and I will not be able to get back to sleep. 

Moreover, I gave up nicotine long ago.

So I go through my day unassisted by stimulants surrounded by colleagues jacked up on coffee and cigarettes.

Things Bureaucrats Say

The list in the two photos above (which has grown since these photos were taken) sets out words overheard every day in the halls of the bureaucracy. Some are heard in other office environments - wheelhouse, stick handle, dog and pony show - but "TAA" is one that, I'm willing to bet, is unique to the public service. 

This acronym stands for "take appropriate action." It means "I have no idea what to do with this. Please figure it out and make it go away."

Best Laugh of the Week

At two p.m. on Friday afternoon I was on a call with some provincial staff in British Columbia. One of the people in BC made the time-zone-difference-based observation that those of us in Ontario were closer to the weekend than they were in BC. 

I said, "yes, but we're also older."

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Re(dis)organized

The Three Graces, by Canadian sculptor Gerald Gladstone, erected in the early 70's in the  Queen's Park complex, next to MacDonald Block, when it was still OK to spend public money on nice things. The western plaza of MacDonald Block is a secret garden with a short artificial waterway, featuring many fine pieces of public art. There are lots of places to sit under mature trees and enjoy shade and calming green. The plaza is deserted most of the time. 

My thanks to the vanishingly small share of my growing number of subscribers who answered last week's poll.

Your responses allow me these insights:

• I have no readers in any of the places listed in the first question
• I have at least one reader using my blog to learn English as a second language (I am deeply humbled, and now very nervous about getting the language wrong and ruining everything)
• The favourite topic of my readers by a long shot is "life of a government bureaucrat"

Without further ado then, let's make a long overdue visit to the Ruler and her advisors.

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

The Ruler of a small but pleasant realm picked herself up out of a pile of rubble, shook the plaster dust out of her hair, wiped more dust out of her eyes and looked around, assessing the damage.

The place was a shambles. 

The Ruler called out to the Wizard for help. Then she remembered she had been reassigned. She called for her new Advisors.

"Artemis? Pathos? Barney? Are any of you there?" She paused; heard nothing. She tried again. "Cyrus? Petunia?"

Cyrus, her newest most trusted advisor, also dust covered and a bit bruised, shortly appeared in what was left of her chamber door.

"Has the Great Troll been dreaming?" the Ruler asked Cyrus as she tried to get herself upright.

"It appears he has," said Cyrus. He helped his new boss to her feet. 

The Great Troll had long been a restless sleeper. When in his troubled dreams he kicked his great stinking feet, realms throughout the kingdom felt the blow. But for years the impacts had been small enough to dismiss as rumour. No one took them seriously. Until just this very minute.

"How bad is it?" asked the Ruler.

"We've lost about a third of the realm," said Cyrus.

"Which third? Artemis' shop? Barney's?" The Ruler knew her weak spots.

"Artemis'." 

"OK," said the Ruler, sucking it up. "So we're down strength. But we have what we need to carry on," she half said, half asked.

"Maybe," said Cyrus, trying to break the news gently. "We are renamed by this calamity and we have yet to figure out what that means."

"But we are good at that," said the Ruler, not daunted by the prospect, "conjuring stuff out of nothing is what we do."

"That is true," Cyrus replied, "but, you have a new Boss to the First Power and a new Emperor."

"I have not forgotten that," said the Ruler, moving abut her chambers putting chairs and other small furniture to rights. A thought came to her as she busied herself tidying up. "What of the File Perilous? Has that been lost?" she asked, daring to hope.

The File Perilous had come to the Ruler's realm not long before; it was hot as a pistol and bristling with poisoned spines. The Ruler and her Advisors had managed to extricate two of the poisoned spines and take the temperature down a notch. She hoped as her reward that another Ruler would be given the file. 

"That's the worst news of all," said Cyrus, and he pointed to the chamber door.

The File Perilous stood there, filling the frame, a horrifying apparition of heretofore unimagined girth and fury. The Ruler saw that where the two poison barbs had been removed three more had grown in their place. She could feel the heat from across the room.

"I'm back," said the File Perilous.

To be continued ...

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Women In the News

Spotted on Gerrard Street by the Ryerson University campus. Whoever is responsible for these unpopular posters gets around. Click here for a story about other words of the prophet showing up in Don Mills that have a bit more to do with today's post.

Increasingly rarely these days, current events make me feel like progress is still a thing.

For example, male sexual predators are being called out by their female prey. Harvey Weinstein is just the most recent in a long list that started, from the narrow scope of my attention span, with Jian Ghomeshi.

More good news: at least one woman in the world is being paid the same as a man doing the same job.

These encouraging blips - even if they are both in the entertainment industry - make me think that small cultural shifts are possible; gender-based misbehaviour and inequality can be incrementally diminished.

And then along comes incontrovertible proof that the impulse to pick on women is still strong. Quebec's face covering law for all the disingenuous assertions of "universal application" would not exist if it weren't for Muslim women. 

Readers' Poll

I have 217 subscribers now, 100 more than I had a month ago. To support the continuous improvement of this blog, I would like to know a little bit more about my readers. If you'd like to help me with that endeavour, click here to answer a three-question survey.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Sorry Nick

Since October 2015, I have walked at least twice a day by a mural by Nick Sweetman surrounding the vacant lot, slated for redevelopment, at 307 Sherbourne Street, on the south east corner of Sherbourne and Gerrard.

Long-time readers have seen it before.

The artist painted this wasp last year to cover up graffiti on the original painting.

On Wednesday night, at about quarter to 7:00, a double-decker sightseeing bus eastbound on Gerrard, struck another vehicle which took out a fence and cedar hedge on the west corner while the bus crossed the intersection, jumped the curb, hit a power pole and plowed through the fence surrounding the vacant lot.  

It took crews working around the clock two full days to restore the power pole and clear all the damage to public property. 

The hedge across the street is still a ruin.

So is the mural.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Guns Don't Kill People

San Gimignano: Really has nothing to do with today's post.

In the wake of America's record-setting mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, I find myself struggling to make sense of why Americans are struggling to make sense of this tragedy.

Everything the shooter did, up to the moment when he opened fire on the innocent, unsuspecting crowd was entirely within the letter of American law. 

There has been a mass shooting (where four or more people are shot) in the US almost every day this year. 

Somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 (or possibly even 32,000) people die by gun violence every year in the USA. Up to two thirds of these deaths are suicides.

Americans have a 1 in 130 chance of dying by gun violence.

The sentiments of the people who adamantly support the second amendment of the US Constitution can be summed up this way: "nothing goes wrong most of the time and when it does go wrong, it's not the gun's fault." 

This is how I make sense of the dreadful events in Las Vegas this past week: American freedoms matter more to Americans than the lives they cost no matter how those lives are lost: at home with a bullet through your head, at a shopping mall at the hands of your three year old, at school, at work, or at a live concert on the Las Vegas strip. 

In the early days of the republic, the rallying cry was "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

That can now be updated to "Somewhere between eleven and thirty thousand lives a year is the price of liberty."

Thanks for reading!

Karen