November

On November 11, the day set aside to remember those who fell in defence of the wonderful life we lead, I took pictures of sunny dying leaves on the boughs of trees preparing to live through the winter.

Plus one hydrangea.

And then I Waterlogued and Percolatered them to accentuate, even in the sad end, the beauty of the colours and patterns. 

 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Security and Ritual

Clock tower: Yonge and Yorkville, Toronto, Ontario

After the tragic, criminal and deeply sad events in Ottawa on October 22 2014, the Ontario Provincial Police officers who normally maintain a lax and cheerful security presence in the granite halls of Queens Park where I work, were, for about a week, doubled up in numbers and not cheerful. 

The precipitating event was miles away, and within hours shown to be the act of one bad crazy individual having the worst day of his life. But, security was intensified in Queen's Park because, well, we just don't know how far the threat extends....

Edgy, less friendly OPP officers is one thing, I suppose, but I personally don't see any reason to shrink the liberties of the whole population because a deranged and angry young man took a deer rifle with six bullets in it to Canada's Parliament. There are laws enough on the books to address the terrible wasting of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo's life. The young gunman certainly paid the price for his awful intentions.

But, because of the times we live in, these events create a space in the public mind where we openly contemplate making everyone less free for the sake of creating an illusion of security.   

I can say this even though I know that I am utterly ignorant of the terrible threats that surround us. 

I have enough on my mind with the threats I do know about: the annual toll on the roads from people texting while driving; the lives wasted and the costs to society due to drug abuse and an inadequate social safety net; and climate change! Plus vampires!

Anyway. 

Just the other day I performed a small ritual that proves the illusion. 

I was flying to Ottawa. 

The ritual to ward off evil before every flight is to pass through a small archway and not make it beep. To avoid the beep, people unburden themselves of anything metal: men remove their watches and belts; women their jewellery. People also often remove their footwear.

I was wearing a pair of shoes that I'd never travelled in before and, after conferring with the security guard who'd just handed me back my boarding pass, I took them off as a sign of my willingness to not make the archway beep. 

But the archway beeped.

The price of causing a beep is to be wanded by security personnel so that the offending item can be located and removed. Then you have to go back through the arch again.

While I was being wanded, I wondered what might be the offending item.

The wand found something, but, the guard waved me on without making me take anything off or go through the archway again. 

She said, sotto voce, "It's your bra."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Calculated Risks

Two Toronto bike owners have calculated that the risk the City will come along and take away their bikes is not as great as the risk that their bikes will be stolen if they are not locked to the post that says "Do Not Lock Your Bike Here."

At the other end of the spectrum of risk calculation are great efforts that go into avoiding small risks.

For example, due to circumstances beyond my control, I recently found myself faced with the task of simultaneously recruiting four positions in my shop. Anyone familiar with the nightmare of excessively risk adverse public sector procurement knows that the only thing worse than that is even more excessively risk adverse public sector human resources recruitment.

Because these are confidential matters, I will describe fanciful circumstances to shed light on the real.

Once upon a time the ruler of small kingdom found herself short a few officials. Consulting with her advisors on how she might add to her bureaucracy, they all cautioned her of the grave danger that, among the many who could be asked to serve, one might be a witch.

"A witch?" asked the ruler. "Are you serious?"

"Very serious," all her advisors agreed, vigorously nodding their heads. "You can't be too careful about witches."

"OK then," said the ruler, "How do I guard myself against witches?"

"Easy," said her advisors. "You just plug your ears when they answer your questions at their interview."

"When you say they, are you referring to just the witches or all the candidates," asked the ruler.

"Oh," said her advisors, a bit surprised that their ruler was so stupid, "All of the candidates, because one of them might be a witch. Witches lure you with their spells you know."

"I see," said the ruler, worried that she might be appearing stupid. "But if I plug my ears, I won't be able to hear what any of the candidates say."

"That's right," said her smiling advisers, relieved that their ruler was not stupid after all.

"So let me just make sure I've got this right. Because one of the people I talk to may be a witch and lure me with spells, and, I suppose, get me to bring them into court where, again I'm speculating, they may do bad witchy things....?" The ruler trailed off to see how she was doing. 

Her advisors were enrapt. They nodded to encourage her.

"So, to avoid the chance of being lured into bad unknown witchy things, I will stop my ears and not hear any of my candidates so I won't know if they are bad or good, which will mean that I will make a decision based on no other information than how they look that day ...." The ruler stopped again.

"Yes! Yes!" Her advisors cheered. "Hooray for our wise and noble ruler!"

Distracted by the force of this extreme flattery, the ruler thanked her advisors, said goodbye and made one last observation.

"You know, if I can't hear any of the candidates, that means I still could recruit a witch, or maybe something even worse ..."

Demoralized by their ruler's sudden change in position, the advisors bowed their way backward out of the room, resolved to add blindfolds to the recruitment rules. 

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Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Opportunities

Not long ago I was at St Michael's hospital for an unlovely mammogram. I came in, for the first time ever, through the old Bond Street entrance, views of which are shown in the photos above. 

Walk into this monster downtown hospital through any other door and all you will see is institutional functionality in the spaces and design. Linoleum. Stainless steel. Lucite. Composites of plastic. Amalgams of stone. Plaques commemorating donors. Nothing is pretty for its own sake, not even the flowers.

The hospital is connected with all its parts through labyrinthine hallways no matter what door you come in. So, from now on, I will go in through the Bond Street doors.

Sparky Readers' Poll Results

When asked if they had the chance to live their life again and still spend the time to read Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery, 100% of those polled said "yes."

100% of respondents also wondered if there would be more Sparky stories.

Based on this overwhelming response by one billionth of the world's population, there will be more Sparky stories, featuring more fun characters with less complicated personal histories. Also, if the comedy of manners swirling around Sparky goes in its current direction there will be fewer - and perhaps no - mysterious deaths.

(It's not too late to participate in the poll! You can find it here.)

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Gather Ye Rosebuds

Biggest rose bud I've ever seen. Victoria B.C July 2014

I forget why now, but I was reading up recently on the Internet about Alferd Packer, an American famous for allegedly having eaten other Americans.

The story is that Alferd and five companions headed out -- against the sage advice of a local first nations leader -- into late season weather in search of gold. They were poorly provisioned, the going was hard and after weeks on the trail they were out of food, starving and immobilized by bad weather.

The sole survivor of this ordeal, Alferd, was seen coming some months later into a town, well-fed looking, his pockets brimming with gold coins.

An individual made suspicious by Alferd's account of what happened investigated and found to his horror human remains on the trail - Alferd's companions - at least one headless and all showing signs of having been gnawed upon.

The surmise of the good townsfolk was that Alferd had killed, eaten and robbed his companions and, so charged, Alferd was incarcerated.

The snippets of information scattered randomly over Wikipedia and other sources of rumour and half-truths said that Alferd had made three contradictory confessions.

I drove myself a little crazy trying to find those three confessions on the Internet but find them I did.

The grisly details about anthropophagy are not the only things that pique my interest. Stories of wilderness survival often contain other useful information. 

In two of Alferd's three confessions he includes details of how he searched mountainsides for food, in particular he searched for wild rose bushes containing rose buds (now called rose hips) that could be boiled and eaten. 

Rose hips have been food for humans since the stone age apparently and are good sources of vitamin C and anti-oxidants, so, while you may still eventually die in the wilderness, eating rose hips will ensure you suffer from neither colds nor cancer.

You are also well advised, per the photo above, to lose your path and not have groceries at the south end of Vancouver Island, where the rose hips grow to a great size and can feed a multitude.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

What the Hell Is That?!? and Sparky: The Reader Survey

On rare occasions these days I have fun at my job. And so I recently was in Union Station to start a tour of the unimaginably complicated "Big Move" infrastructure works - or, at least, the parts of those works involving the connection of Union Station with Pearson Airport. I had people from all over the country trailing after me as we made our way through the mobs of commuters and construction-caused congestion on the walkways into the station.

Then we looked up and saw the thing in the picture. Everyone wanted an explanation right away and the one I gave them ... "I think it has something to do with Nuit Blanche " ... didn't suffice.

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I want to thank all my readers - 22 of you according to Google - who chugged all the way through Sparky's murder mystery. I had a lot of fun writing the story, though it caused me a recreational level of stress, too. The same sort of stress, I imagine, a reasonably capable downhill skier feels when they're on a difficult or new slope. They know they've got the skills to get to the bottom in one piece, they're just not entirely sure how they'll get there. The uncertainty is part of the fun.

As I fumbled my way through the twenty-one episodes, my thrilling uncertainty was twofold: is anyone reading this? and, if people are reading it, are they enjoying it? 

If you'd like, you can answer a very short, five minute survey to sate my lingering curiosity about the readers' response to Sparky's story.

You can find the Readers' Survey here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

This One's For Kevan and Sparky: Final Chapter

This clean, well-lit place is the far-below-ground-level workshop in the Bank of America Tower in New York City. The building engineer was as proud of this space as any he showed us during our tour of NYC's most energy-efficent office tower. He also explained, not at all defensively, that even though a recent news article had said New York's third tallest tower consumed twice as much energy as the Empire State Building, that did not account for the fact that there is a lot more going on, and a lot more people working in, the Bank of America Tower. 

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Final Chapter 

Sparky here. This is the final chapter of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

The last person I would have expected to see standing behind the counter at the Starbucks by the ravine was Marriba, but, there she was, big as life. She seemed happy to see me.

After I ordered and sat down with my vente decaf skim iced latte and cranberry scone, Marriba joined me at my table.

What are you doing here?” I asked her, leaving unstated the second part of the question, which was “I thought you’d been banned for life from the entire service sector.”

“New medication,” she snapped, ”I feel a little fuzzy and stupid at times but I am much calmer around people and can perform the meaningless tasks the job requires. It keeps me out of the house and that is far to be preferred.”

She looked hard at me, and the scratches and bites on my arms and face.

“What has happened to you?”

I told her about my day’s adventure in the ravine and why I had gone there in the first place.

I showed her the jar.

She grabbed it out of my hand.

“I knew she stole it!”

“Who?”

“Carol!”

“Is that how you lost your job at the Gardens? You kept asking Carol about the jar?”

Marriba looked a little puzzled.

“No,” she said. “They told me they could not renew my contract. I never asked why. I was happy to leave.”

“Did you ever ask Carol about the jar?”

“Yes. Many times. I asked everyone about the jar. Some one had stolen it. Carol stole it!”

I stopped her.

“Did you ever tell Carol that you had put hand cream in the jar?"

“No. What was in the jar was not the point. The point was I had the jar and then it was stolen!”

I told Marriba about my theory about how Carol or Dubs may have put hogweed sap into the jar. They wouldn’t have known that Marriba rinsed it out and replaced it with hand cream. They had the jar with them when they went into the ravine.

“I have no idea what exactly happened to them in the ravine, but they must have run into Gerry.

“Otherwise, they would have retrieved the truck after it broke down. They could easily have explained what two tree specialists were doing in the ravine. But, when they found out the next morning that Gerry was dead, they went back, tipped it off the path and covered it up and let the police think it was lost forever. The only reason they would do that is because they thought if the police knew they were in the ravine, they would have been implicated in Gerry’s death.

“It has something to do with that jar.

“When I started asking questions last summer about hogweed Carol stopped talking to me. When you wouldn’t stop asking questions about your jar you suddenly couldn’t work at the Gardens anymore.”

“But there was nothing in the jar to hurt anyone,” said Marriba.

“Yes. But Carol and Dubs didn’t know that.”

Marriba took a deep breath.

“You think that Carol and Dubs stole the gardeners’ truck and ran into Gerry Ringbold in the midst of drug dealers and prostitutes. Then these three had some kind of adventure that included an offer by Carol or Dubs and the acceptance by Ringbold of what was thought to be a toxic substance disguised as sunscreen. Ringbold then applied this to his person and thoughtfully returned the jar to his tormentors. Some time after this our suspects drove away deeper into the ravine until the truck broke down while Gerry made his way into the Gardens, got as far as the gardener’s shed where he collapsed and died of a heart attack that could not have been related to the hypothetical application of a substance that was not toxic.”

“Well, when you say it like that, it seems far fetched,” I said, “but I imagine something like that did happen.”

“If so,” said Marriba, “Then it is not a murder. It is just a natural death dressed up with lots of silly details.

“It has been nice to talk with you,” said Marriba, “Good luck with the rest of your research.”  And she got up from the table and went back to work behind the counter.

Epilogue

When I started this story about the mysterious death of Gerry Ringbold, the case was still open and I had not yet gone into the ravine. I imagined that I had it all figured out and would find everything I needed to know in the ravine to complete the story, but, I didn’t. So I did the next best thing.

After my chat with Marriba, I phoned in an anonymous tip to the police about where they would find the gardener’s truck. Dubs and Carol were arrested and confessed shortly after that. The lead on the truck unlocked some unanswered questions the police had not disclosed to the media about tapes missing from the security cameras.

It turns out Dubs and Carol had run into Gerry in the ravine. There was a short, mostly verbal fight and Gerry collapsed. When Dubs and Carol loaded him into the truck he was still alive, but, by the time they got him to street level, he was dead. 

They panicked, fearing they would be blamed for his death, dropped his corpse in the garden shed and high tailed it back through the ravine. They drove until they had a reasonable distance between themselves and the Gardens, ditched the truck and went for a coffee to establish an alibi.

Other than stealing the truck, and removing the tapes from the security cameras, Dubs and Carol had committed no actual crime but they lost their jobs anyway. There’s a new chief arborist in the Thompson Gardens and a new lead botanist in the Palm House.

As for me, I’m heading into second year law school. Next year I’ll spend my summer either at a law firm or maybe as an unpaid intern at a local media company. I’m done with the Thompson Gardens.