Happy New Year

2020 was the cause of such generally recognized consternation (as opposed to locally recognized consternation... see Syria), that its last day deserves some special mention.

Everyone seems glad that it's over, as if, somehow, everything will be different on January 1, 2021.

The whole slice of humanity included in "everyone" can be forgiven their understandable desire to load all their hopes and dreams into 2021. And if that doesn't work out, there's always 2022. 

***

Water, Three Ways

Here are some shots I took on the Leslie Street Spit on 27 December 2020.

Upside down icicles by the pedestrian bridge

Droplets decorating the already beautiful head of a male mallard

Rebar threaded with soft-cornered brick beads and snarling with dragon's tooth icicles

Thanks for reading!

See you (I hope) next year!

Karen

My favourite recent holiday
tradition. Tortiere du shack. If 
you like tortiere, you
really gotta try the recipe.

It's the End of the Year as We Know It

Christmas day dumped an attractive amount of snow on Toronto. My Facebook and Instagram feeds were full of shots just like the one above.

In the run up to the holiday lockdown, frenzied future self-isolators cleaned off grocery store shelves just like it was March 2020.

Street art on University Avenue complained that even record vacancy rates couldn't make up for income lost to the pandemic.

Most of the holiday messages I received mixed acknowledgements of how bad 2020 was with hopes that the coming year will be better. 

With everything that we know for certain is coming...

• the worst days of the pandemic
• the final death throes of the Trump administration
• a new, improved COVID variant
• Venom 2

... I think it's most appropriate to say...

Brace yourself for 2021!

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

Karen

Keep yer distance: lots of shoppers,
Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens

Solstice 2020

Allan Gardens Christmas 2016

Allan Gardens Christmas 2014

Allan Gardens Christmas 2011

Allan Gardens Christmas 2018

Allan Gardens Christmas 2017

Allan Gardens Christmas 2019

On the shortest day, in the dead of winter before there was Christmas, people loaded what food they had on the table, lit all the torches, came together and defied the long night with celebration. 

It worked: the darkness receded, the days warmed, spring came.

Whipping darkness with joy is humanity’s best trick, even better than turning paper into money, words into song, plant sap and cow’s milk into ice cream. 

The genius of joy is the trick up your sleeve this dead of winter, the real magic of the holiday.

***

For everyone on my Christmas card list, the passage above should ring familiar. 

For everyone seeing it for the first time, it's my heartfelt wish for you on the shortest day of the longest year in living memory.

Have a safe and happy holiday!

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Christmas 1967

Not that Kind of Woke

Found in the Allan Gardens: someone shared their good news.

Monsters under the bed were not a problem when I was a kid. I'd heard of the bogeyman, but never met him. I slept like a stone my entire childhood. My sleep was so profound that sometimes I'd go for a walk while out like a light. 

Many years later, I joked that no one over 40 sleeps through the night. I don't remember when I stopped being able to land an uninterrupted sleep, but, for 'way more years than I was an effortlessly slumbering child, I've had the Wake Up Monster (WUM) living under my bed.

I have made sacrifices in an attempt to appease the WUM. I have sworn off caffeine. I don't even eat chocolate anymore. 

But the WUM's more like a bossy lifestyle coach than a volcano god. It wants me to exercise regularly, take yoga classes, meditate and avoid alcohol. 

No matter what I do, the WUM reaches out every night to wake me up. A hot flash. An ear worm. A full bladder. All of the above.

Some nights I get back to sleep; some nights I don't.

I imagine the WUM looks like Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc. The one wakeful eye seems appropriate.

Because I'm retired, sleepless nights don't really matter, and, these days, any additional company at all, even in the form of an imaginary pest, is welcome.

The Rest of Our Lives

In the cold, dark, midwinter Toronto lockdown, Bruce and I do two things. We go shopping for food once a week; for the rest of the week, we eat that food.

Thanks for reading!

Stay safe and warm!

Karen  

Blade Runner and the Fermi Paradox

 

People like to imagine that there are thousands of worlds in the universe with beings on them that, like us, like to travel, trade goods and wage wars. At least that's one explanation for the popularity of Star Wars. People cling to this fanciful notion - the same way they cling to many others - despite growing certainty that it cannot possibly be true.

Long ago in one of the e-mails that preceded this blog, I considered the Fermi Paradox, which is the question "Where is everyone?" in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars and ten times that many planets. I reacted then to an article I'd read that said the Fermi paradox "proved" that societies capable of space travel destroy themselves before they develop the technology to travel to the stars (because, just like us, they would want to do that). 

I proposed some other "proofs": interstellar travel is not and never will be possible; or, aliens have found us and decided to leave us alone; or, still my favourite, giant space spiders.

Clever thinkers in the meantime have added to the already long odds of the enormity of space and time, the insane rarity of the evolution of space-travelling beings. Think about it this way: we imagine ourselves to be the most intelligent species ever, yet we've barely figured out how to get to the moon. 

It's hard to accept the evidence of our own eyes, but the Fermi Paradox is no more a paradox than "Where are all the unicorns?": there are no space travelling beings because, so far as we will ever be able to tell, they don't exist. 

Which brings me to Blade Runner.

Released in 1982, based on a story published in 1968, and imagining the world in 2019, Blade Runner mashes together a retro, hard-boiled dick sensibility with a brutalist Pacific rim aesthetic. I watched it last night. 

In 1982, it was possible to imagine that by 2019 there'd be flying cars and mass-produced artificial life, plus glow-handle umbrellas and stores that sell eyeballs. But it was not possible in 1982 to imagine that by 2019 no one would smoke indoors. Interior shots through veils of smoke make the movie look dated even more than its DOS-based computers. 

Because of these and other inescapable limitations wrought by time and space, the movie has transformed over the years from the vision of a dystopian future to a kind of parallel reality: Earth if you rewound the tape, played it back and got a different result.

Which brings me back to Fermi's putative paradox. Stephen J. Gould said in Wonderful Life (a study of the Burgess Shale fossils) that the results of evolution are improbable. If you rewound the tape of life on Earth and played it again, you would not get the same result. You might not even get humans. 

Our existence, let alone our intelligence, is a fluke the size of the universe. People looking for a source of wonder could just consider the fact that we are here at all. And anyone feeling alone in the universe should watch My Octopus Teacher.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Lockdown Miscellany

  

  

The Allan Gardens greenhouse, normally decked out in holiday finery this time of year, is closed for the duration. It will reopen with everything else (with luck) on the 21st of December, but, will then swarm with COVID-breathing humans, so, please accept the above shots of the backyard as my tribute to the season. Luckily we had some snow and, so far, the squirrels have not chewed through the decorations.  

What I Gave Up For The Lockdown

It was actually before Ford categorically admitted for the Nth time with the lockdown that he has no clue what he is doing that I decided to give up the news. I cancelled my subscriptions to the Washington Post, the daily news aggregator WTFJHT and to the several podcasts I listened to each day. Hysteria masquerading as news about the US election and the pandemic was making me crazy. Now I keep a healthy distance between me and most of the chatter, even the late night comics.  

I've also given up my FitBit, the bossy little friend that's been wearing a dent in my right wrist for more than two years. The gadget's getting long in the tooth. A push notification recently told me that I'd need to buy a new one if I wanted the latest innovation in more-than-I-want-to-know about myself. But it's not the 'Bit's planned obsolescence that made me take it off. It's the cheap-ass wrist bands. The one that shipped with the unit broke about a year after I bought it. The replacement band broke in less than six months. I'd kept and repaired the original band, so I used that next. It broke this past week. Then there's the fact that, after ten months of practically identical days, there's nothing the 'Bit can tell me that I don't already know. 

Book Plug

A couple of weeks ago, Bruce and I attended a friend's Zoomed book launch party. Jamie Dopp, whom Bruce has known since childhood and I've known since university, just published Driving Lessons, a lightly fictionalized memoir of coming of age in Waterloo, Ontario. The protagonist's perspective is, of necessity, that of a brattish boy, so some bits may rankle, but it's a good, solidly Canadian read. There's even a loving description of a game of road hockey.   

Why the Lockdown May Not Work

Public health messaging and Christmas marketing campaigns are equal and opposite forces at work this holiday season. Everybody's best friend, Galen Weston, on the one hand urges social distancing etc., in Loblaw stores and, on the other, promotes purchases for large festive gatherings. And then there's this:

The first time I saw a truck like this 'way back in April, it was one of those previously non-ironic signs and advertisements. Now it's an incitement to anti-social behaviour.

Finally ... This

... in someone's window on Winchester Street. 

All that's missing is "U."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen