Month: September 2014

What do you do when your 20 year old Blue Atlas tree shuffles off its mortal coil? If you’re Mossie Iafrate of Windsor, ON, you apply your brilliant imagination and come up with a great Blue Heron.

Thanks to Mossie’s wife Sylvine Duguay-Iafrate for sharing her photos.

We can use the money to dig our way out of provincial debt, but even better, we can end the practice of having the government swindle its citizens. I always thought it was more fitting to have organized crime run these rackets. Bell, Rogers? Reasonable substitutes.
[Not so fast, Bill.] The government will still accept kickbacks, after selling lottery management. There has been no enlightenment regarding government as servant of the public rather than as exploiter of same.

Copenhagen, Denmark has decided to take cycling seriously as a mode of transportation. Their winters can’t be any milder than ours. Why can’t we do this kind of thing?
Our bicycle courier companies have known for years that bikes are faster and more efficient than motor vehicles in downtown traffic. Where’s the downside? People get a bit of exercise and there’s less air pollution.

Soknacki gets my vote for mayor, as I told him when he dropped by a local coffee shop to answer questions. The 2 hour session showed Soknacki to be sincere, sensible, sober and smart. He’s an abstract generalist and a detail guy at the same time. Can he survive in the middle space where most of us live? I hope so.

Here are some points I took away from answers he gave to questions. Soknacki would:

• Fix land transfer tax to protect entry level buyers
• Cut red tape for new businesses to create jobs
• Fix the eastern end of the Gardiner and pay for it with recovered real estate
• Make landlords pay taxes on empty storefronts
• Move downtown core traffic. Reduce main thoroughfare parking, add more parkades
• Ease TTC morning rush with free rides before 7:00 a.m.
• Break the monolithic Toronto Housing Corporation into manageable parts
• Get back the $40 million for social services that McGuinty cut
• Build the Scarborough LRT that we could have had by now
• Save $60 million on policing without any cuts to actual policing
• Open city databases for everyone to use inventively
• Restore focus on environmentalism. Air, parks, quality of life issues
• Review water services to maximize results, especially flood control
• Enforce no parking in bicycle lanes.
• Support ranked ballots for civic elections

We can get rid of Rob Ford and still have a financially conservative, imaginative but practical mayor who speaks to us as adults. Lots of time yet to consider David Soknacki.

Danica and I joined our neighbours in their walk to Woodbine Park, banded together as “Soula’s Angels” in memory of a family member who died prematurely, of ovarian cancer, a decade ago.
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We all know that marching, cycling, singing and dancing have no effect on cancer. We know that the money raised has no direct effect, either. Much of it is drained off to pay for the very fundraising that creates the pot.
We do it because we don’t know what else to do. We do it because it brings us together in our sadness over those we’ve lost to cancer, and for those we know who are suffering with it. It is a frail, human, helpless hope that brings us out.

John Robert Colombo made possible a visit with Ray Souster (prounounced Sow-ster, not Soo-ster), for Danica and me, before Ray died in 2012. When I heard that JRC would be speaking at the unveiling of a commemorative plaque, I decided to attend.
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Three honours were bestowed. The stairs into the park are now the Souster Steps, the plaque stands at their foot and another plaque will mark the house at 28 Mayfield Avenue nearby, where the poet lived from 1947 to 1964.

I particularly wanted to meet and thank Donna Dunlop for her part in arranging our afternoon with Mr Souster. She remembered our visit and Ray had told her all about our pleasant time together.

Some day, we may actually do away with the ugly wires and cords of our Electric Era. That would be nice. But what amazes me is the unchanging way futurists picture their heavens.
If you have the time or are interested in wirelessly charged electric cars, watch this laughably pompous Siemens fantasy. Then look at General Motors’ vision from 1939, pictured below.
http://youtu.be/dr1mBPySz7U

Seated viewers at the top of the images are looking down at the 1939 World Fair model. Doesn’t it look a lot like the Seimens dream, 75 years later?

Sure, we can all get better shots of the Moon, for free, from NASA. But as the third supermoon of the summer approaches (September 8th), I decided to try out my little Sony DSC WX350’s 20x zoom on the big, bright show before the Moon is full.
As I hoped, the craters are easiest to make out on the shadowed edge, especially the ones at the bottom. Not bad for handheld, eh? It’s amazing how far digital cameras have come in a few, short years.

Danica and I are now proud owners of Lloyd Cooke‘s excellent watercolour character study of Mexican potter Don Eduardo.

Lloyd exchanged his work for two pieces by Helen Andersen. Cheryl is holding a gouache painting of a solitary native figure wearing a Chilkat blanket. Lloyd holds his choice, an air brush gouache of James Island.

We are very pleased with our exchange. Danica and I like the fact that two more Helen Andersen’s are up on walls where they will be cared for and appreciated. By the same token, we get to enjoy an original Lloyd Cooke, on our walls.
Lloyd has a show coming up, but I’ll save that for another entry … in time for September 27th, though, if you’d like to go. It will be at Edward Gardens.

How can you NOT like a guy who answers Number 4 this way:

Soks for Mayor