Author: Bill

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?

I asked for a photo from award ceremony day and it just came in, so I am sharing it. Everyone is very proud of Rowyn’s achievement.
More photos below.

500px.com is a photo sharing site for photographers (and aspiring photographers), offering a place to showcase and even sell their best work. The site is a Canadian startup that has been online for over 3 years. It has over a million and a half members now and accounts are free. It also has one of the easiest to read Term of Service pages I’ve seen. (Legalese on the left, plain English on the right)
If you are prepared to lose some time pleasantly, check it out. I did a search for Toronto, of course, to start my exploration.
Free apps are available for all popular operating systems, devices, etc.

I think there was a time when names were called proper nouns… you know, the kind of name that starts with a capital letter. When we were downtown yesterday, it occurred to me that “temporary nouns” might be a useful term for buidings and facilities that sell naming rights.
The notion popped up as we walked past the Sony Centre (formerly Hummingbird Centre and O’Keefe Centre before that). We had just left the SkyDome (named Rogers Centre at the moment), after having lunch at the former BCE Place, now called Brookfield Place. Hotels play the name change game with great frequency, too, as various chains swap real estate.