Author: Bill

If our snow remains confined to a window display at the local stained glass window store, I’m good with that. I hope we get another winter as mild as last year’s but prognosticators tell me I’m dreaming.
Here’s the little sign that hangs on the store display…

Here’s how we happened to be at a concert in a school gym, listening to a concert being given by OPK [Other People’s Kids].
I saw that our friend Brian was following something called Sistema on Twitter. Curiosity led to website, led to news of the Friday concert at Parkdale Junior and Senior High School. Dr. Draw was the final draw. Danica and I were hooked.

Owner Stephen Fowler (top right) runs a unique and wonderful store on Dundas West near Ossington.
Danica and I spent an hour in The Monkey’s Paw antiquarian bookstore yesterday and made two nice scores from the Biblio-Mat. For my toonie, I got a slim volume originally published in 1930 and reprinted up to an 8th edition in 1958. It held 15 “Crow” poems by Canadian poet Wilson MacDonald. For example, this one on the subject of modern art:

So far, Twitter’s answer to Facebook’s Instagram is available only on iPhones, not iPads or other Apple devices such as iMacs and laptops. This will probably change soon, but for now, it’s iPhones only.

Bloor may have its Mink Mile, but Coxwell has its Dollar Block. A Dollar Tree store (almost) opened today, to compete with the Dollarama a few doors away. A store inspector was late arriving, so no one knew when the public would be let in. [I don’t think the doors ever did open on Opening Day.]

It’s nice to have free wifi, even if it’s as weak as the signal at Druxy’s on Queen East, across from St. Mike’s Hospital. Less than a fifth of a megabyte per second? That’s so incredibly slow, there MUST be an explanation. I have a theory…

I’m not a card-carrying anything, but I do agree with Andrea Horwath on this one. Dalton McGuinty has some nerve shutting down the whole parliament while his party picks through its leadership pile. The (yawn) petition.

Out walking, I sometimes catch fragments of phrases uttered by other pedestrians. A gentleman was taking a photo of 2 little kids and their Mom, who was kneeling down between them. As I passed, he was looking at the shot in his view finder and determined that one of the children looked “disconsolate”. He looked at the 3 year old and said, “Do you understand disconsolate?”
Over by Coxwell while waiting for a light to change, this:
“I really wanted to punch the guy out, he pissed me off so much. If he hadn’t been standing in front of a girl I wanted to date, I woulda given him a love tap.”

Peter Sever called this minute-and-a-half video to my attention, saying:

One of my father’s relatives-by-marriage is among the 699 saved children. She lives outside Hamilton. I discovered this in a phone call this week…

Here’s the backstory…

Is this pretty or what? My new Iomega Mac Companion External Desktop Hard Drive fits precisely onto the foot of my iMac. It’s even contoured to match the shape of the iMac stand. Match aluminum, too, as you see. Two terabytes of storage, Firewire 800 speed, and pleasantly quiet. It cost over $200 with tax, but that the same as I paid for my defunct Elephant Drive and the new one has 4 times the storage. Will it last better than the Elephant Drive? Iomega thinks so. They give the thing a 3-year warrantee.
Fingers crossed. I am creating a new Time Machine backup as I type this.