Month: May 2014

I wondered how masons were managing to clad new buildings so quickly, especially on cold winter days. A friend told me about fake brick panels. Today I saw some close-up, parked by the road, waiting for the crane.

Toronto loves the brick look. Most of the city is made of bricks. Even though our materials now are chipboard, concrete, aluminum and glass, we like to pretend. It’s called skeuomorphism (faking real stuff) and it goes back at least to ancient Egypt, where stone columns were carved to look like the bundled reed poles that came first.

One of our local taggers is a sensitive aesthete.

Under the Woodbine Go train bridge today
I can never remember how to spell graffitti grafitti graffiti, either.

Every life comes with an amount of inconvenience that cannot be avoided, no matter how it is postponed.
Examples:

Rob’s Big Lie about saving a billion was bolder, but he’s on the bench right now. Tim Hudak’s election commercial says a million Ontarians are out out work. Statistics Canada says the number is 555.6 thousand. About half. Who ya gonna believe?
If it wasn’t just BS, Tim’s million job plan would create a serious labour shortage in Ontario!

Pent up demand for outdoor activities is being met in Toronto! There’s almost too much to take in, all packed in the May 24th weekend.

This is going to take some scheduling. I promised to take some photos of the Beach Hill Spring Thing, but I want to make some Doors Open visits and check out the Danforth Art Supplies Swap Meet on Saturday. Hope the weather’s good.

When I read that Google and Apple had agreed to stop suing each other over certain patent issues, I was reminded of how similar our virtual world is to our geopolitical one.
Companies are like countries, but the major forces are the alliances. Apple and Google are on the “same side” in many ways. Rivals are in Asia.
How privileged I feel, to have seen the internet in it’s innocent infancy when any act of commerce was swiftly condemned.

Click anywhere on the map to go to the interactive map.

When on the interactive map, clicking the neighbourhood icons will generate lists of books set in the locale. I found that The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies had been overlooked on the Beach list. St. Aidan’s Church on Silverbirch is an important setting in that major novel.
If you have similar contributions to make, why not let the library know?
Update:The library emailed to say that The Cunning Man has been added to the Beach list. See how responsive they are?

Same great eye, new zoom capabilities. Rebecca Staton’s shots of High Park have not appeared here for a while. Perfect time to correct that.

The cherry blossom show in the park is less than spectacular this year, thanks to an icy winter and prolonged cold weather. A tight view and a colourful bird make up for that! Most remarkably, Rebecca’s shots are composed entirely in the camera. what we see is what she shot. No Photoshop, not even cropping.

If I practice hard for 10 years, I could do this … I mean, get to be 79.

Thanks for the link, Ian.

Local “ethnic” newspapers can be very informative, even if the stories have no personal impact. I like to be reminded that our celebrities are completely interchangeable with other beautiful people I’ve never heard of. Far away politics, sporting events and love affairs are pleasantly remote and remind me that similar Canadian concerns are just as fleeting, just as obscure to most of the world.