Month: March 2013

For many months, a long plywood hoarding flanked the sidewalk in front of the site on Edgewood where the old school once stood. According to the signage, the fence was protecting the boulevard trees. Good, I thought.
Yesterday I walked by and saw that a major section of the hoarding was gone… and so were some trees. Free firewood, says a new sign.

This little snapshot from our local Good Time Coffee Shop is here in case Ivan drops by. I gave my URL to his mother Lisa today.
Ben and Lisa run a nice, friendly shop that I visit at least once a week. They tell me that Ivan is enjoying his new tablet with wi-fi. Cool! If you find this Ivan, click the Comment balloon above this message and say “hello”.
One more thing. How about showing your Mom how you can take a snapshot (or even a short video) and send it by email to China!

JRC responds with information about a unique operation called Citizen Lab. Click the link to learn more about it. Thanks, JR.

I’m not a fan of rap, but this ditty about Toronto’s trendy-brandy parka obsession did amuse me. Pardon the language, if you are not used to it already.

Do go and get more.

Two Colombo items in a row, this one illustrated appropriately by a piece of snail mail that arrived today. What better way to send an article about antiquated printed matter?
John Robert Colombo came across the article (also readable here) in his copy of the New York Times Style Magazine. It does a very nice job of praising Toronto’s Monkey’s Paw antiquarian bookstore. Of course, you read about such places here first, but the New York Times does catch up after a while. They don’t have a Quicktime movie of Danica using the Biblio-Mat, but such are the limitations of print, I’m afraid.

John Robert Colombo’s A Standing Wave (see item below) came out recently, so I thought of it when I saw this interesting video.

“Flea market“. It sounded so interesting and exotic when I first heard the phrase. Someone was showing me a chunky, all wooden butterfly corkscrew they had picked up at a flea market in Paris.
So I am still drawn to flea markets, even though most of them around here are just big dollar stores. Lots of colourful junk, cheapo electronics, kitschy art and polyester fabrics. Still, it wasn’t ALL predictable.

Today’s shot from my bus window on Woodbine. What do you think? Both the wrapped part of the window and the unwrapped part look about the same, right?
Corporate grafitti is splashed over public surfaces to a much greater extent than the amateur stuff and I’ve been responsible for my share… even bus wraps. I don’t like them any more than anyone else does but we excused ourselves by pretending that the mesh support, viewed from the outside, looked opaque. From the inside, we told ourselves, riders’ views out windows would not be hindered.

Friend and multimedia artist Bill Byres makes paintings and collages in traditional media but lately he has been producing more and more work on his computer. Click on the image above to reveal a BIG look (nearly 2MB image size) at the collage in the background.
You’ll probably have to scroll your browser page to see all of it. How many image sources do you recognize? What impressions do his combinations invoke in your mind?