Month: September 2012

Yonge Street was closed to cars on Saturday night, from Dundas Square to south of Queen. Bay and other streets got the same treatment so that thousands of nighthawks could prowl hundreds of art installations and performances.
ByoLogyx was one of our favourite events… too elaborate in concept to explain here, but there where uniformed “security” people confronted by mock protesters, an injection clinic and alleged bio-hazard conspiracies. Kathleen was not intimidated, as you see.
Behind City Hall, a drunken lamppost opened a flap and relieved itself in a steady stream. Yes, the trickle did run toward Council Chambers. Most disrespectful.
We took lots of photos, so I’ll put them into a slideshow and add them ASAP. Meanwhile, here’s my Quicktime movie of a lightshow that was projected onto the Giant Mushroom inside City Hall. As you might have guessed, everything is being sucked down the drain rather than lifted upward.

My neighbour Rick is right and I was wrong. I thought you could encrypt data and store it securely on the free 5 GB of space Apple gives you in its iCloud. Nope. Apple holds the master keys, not us. We can’t store stuff on iCloud that Apple can’t read. Know that if you use it.
There are many other “cloud” services, of course, but from what I’ve read, they don’t sound very private or secure to me, either. I wouldn’t count on them to back up anything really important.
iOS 6 just arrived, with Apple touting 200 new features that either work through iCloud or just don’t work at all on many Apple devices mobile devices. There’s little incentive for me to “upgrade” to the new system, even though it’s free.

The lyrics of the Beatles She Loves You as presented by Dr. Strangelove.
If you’d like more, he did it 3 more times, in different accents. Worth your time, perhaps.

“Might as well cook two at once,” Danica says. “One each?” says I. They are that good. But no, one got put away for another dinner. The other will provide enough leftovers for a second meal.
I don’t know how it’s done, but a spicy rub goes on the chickens before the birds are perched on tall cans full of beer. Smoking wood chips are also involved. Danica has the recipe. If you have her email address, it’s worth asking for.

It wouldn’t look as hip and cool, but really, shouldn’t the special occasion plastic pass be white?… Nuit BLANCHE, y’know?
Quibble aside, TTC Day Passes are a good idea any weekend (or holiday) because two adults can travel on one pass… all day (and night) for $10.50. Get on and off as much as you like. Go everywhere the TTC goes… subway, streetcar or bus. The two adults can even take up to 4 children along on the same pass. Children/youths are defined as anyone 19 years of age or under.
The one-day Nuit Blanche plastic card works just like a regular day pass (which is paper) but it can be kept as a souvenir if you brave the night and go to lots of Nuit Blanche art events. Starts Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. and goes ’til sunrise.

My 10,000 steps [17,300 actually… a record] took me along Kingston Road to Warden today. On the north side, in front of a pilates studio, I spotted this rather surrealistic image. The iPad held the only camera I had with me.
For a wider photo of the whole sculpture, which stands several feet tall,

Oh, I don’t know. Certainly the street looked like a depressing slum and something needed to be done… but was this it? Bright paint is cheap enough and spraying is the easiest way to lay it on, especially if you don’t mind a bit of overspray onto the sidewalks. The graphics don’t appear to be finished, so maybe they’ll improve.

Danica and I stopped by The Maple Leaf Forever tree on our walk today. That’s right, the one in the song. It’s still standing, of course. Wouldn’t be forever, otherwise, would it?
That’s the famous maple tree to the right of Maple Cottage. For a better look, here are some more photos:

Until we visited the Art Down By The Bay show this weekend, I had never heard of fish rubbings. One of the artists had used such a print as the basis for an acrylic painting that I can’t show because photos were not allowed. So I have illustrated this post with an example of such a print, called “gyotaku” prints by the Japanese who first made them in the 1800s.

For one thing, I made the composite image above in Gimp, running in Ubuntu Linux on my Mac desktop.The picture shows what that looks like… the Mac system running as usual, filling the screen, and the Linux system running in its own window.
The photo of yours truly is supposed to show you how I’ve learned to drag and drop images from the Mac, into the Ubuntu Linux system. I didn’t know how to do this until today. (It’s a matter of telling VirtualBox to treat my whole Mac Desktop as a shared folder.)