Older Than It Looks

The slab-like mid-70's vintage twenty-three storey highrise on the southwest corner of Carlton and Jarvis Streets was once the Primrose Hotel. A family of falcons lived somewhere among the raised, illuminated, 3-metre-tall letters that spelled the hotel's name high on its eastern wall.

I imagined they lived in the second "R."

Some years ago, due to delays in the construction of student housing elsewhere, the University of Toronto took over the entire hotel and, as a temporary measure, turned it into student digs.

The change turned out not to be temporary.  Since 2015, the building has been The Parkside, a privately-owned residence for Ryerson, U of T, OCAD and George Brown University students. 

The falcons still hunt the Allan Gardens, though workmen removed the sign they lived in long ago. 

Now, something else is happening on the sunny side of the building.

I noticed this on the last day of the Pride weekend. I thought someone had screwed up, and started at the end of the celebration something that should have been completed at the outset. 

The rainbow bands are part of Toronto's next building-sized piece of art, joining the Phoenix in St. James Town and the thing-I-don't-have-a-word-to-describe up by Yonge and St. Clair. 

The new mural's called "Equilibrium", a work in progress.

New Media Reviews

I've been watching Scishow on YouTube for many months now. The videos feature well-spoken young people talking as fast as they can about science for four to fourteen minutes. I think the first one I watched was about how pain killers work. My all-time favourite is the one about memes. They are terrific. If you have never seen them, you should check them out. 

The oldest things in my house: a 400 million year old trilobite fossil and a 16 million year old mosasaur tooth, both excavated in what is now Morocco, purchased in support of Scishow at Scishow Finds.

Because I'm old, I edge my way slowly into new-fangled ways of transmitting information. Take podcasts for example. I never listened to them. Couldn't see the point. 

Then a friend of mine told me about Gilbert Gottfried's podcast. So I loaded an app on my phone and tried it.

Gottfried's show didn't grab me, but the app pushed a bunch of others my way, including Pod Save America, which, if you can stand the non-stop barrage of all-American-end-of-the-worldism all the time, has some things to commend it.

Nothing tops Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, though. It's the way podcasts should be done. Listen to The Prime Minister and the Prof (or the King of Tears) and see if you can resist listening to all three seasons. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen