Author: Bill

Ulli is staying with us here on Beach Hill for a few days, so we are dragging her around to some favourite places. An attempted visit to the Ydessa Hendeles gallery was a bust because it was closed for installations, so we walked Queen Street West instead.
The Drake Hotel Café served us lattés and scones and let us wander around to look at the art pieces on display in public areas of the hotel. The sculpture of the bald guy is over a stairway: Evan Penny, BACK OF KELLY, V.2, 2005, silicone, pigment, hair. Donna and Ulli sat in Liang Yue’s The Quiet Room and watched 3 screens of video.
Seeing The Gladstone…

It’s official… well, sort of not really official, but fun official… members of the Gerrard Woodbine Neighbourhood Association have voted on a number of choices and selected the name for our vicinity… Beach Hill.
The vote has been going on all summer, starting with a field of 21 names and paring the list down through a series of ballots. With the understanding that we can still call the neighbourhood anything that suits us, a majority vote puts us on Beach Hill.
Hey, Google Maps, get on it… Right by the lakeside, naturally, there’s The Beach. North of that there’s The Beach Triangle and right above that… Beach Hill. You just need to add that last one and you’re good.

As soon as I finish dictating this message, I will be dumping the Dragon Dictation app from my iPad. Why? Because I just realized that everything I say when I am dictating text goes to Dragon, gets transcribed, and then returns to my screen.
I don’t like having Dragon listen in on my dictation. The app is free and it works well enough, as you can see. Still, I would prefer to do my own typing and keep my privacy.
Apple has added dictation to its latest Mac operating system, Mountain Lion, and it works the same way… same lack of privacy. What happened to the concept of personal computers?

I snapped this photo in the Bulk Barn aisles today. I may be retired from the business but I still admire original work.
The mosaic take-off on Munch’s Scream is made entirely of nuts and certainly draws attention to the section it identifies. Fun, too.

This makes my own semi-legible scrawl look reasonably skilled.

At the library today, I spotted one of the reasons that paper books are in trouble. The iPad book is about 5 times as thick as an iPad. It’s probably already out of date and ready for the recycle bin.

Here are some of the headlines:
Something went wrong in the TWA crash, expert says.
Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers.
Safety experts say that school bus passengers should be belted.
Drunk gets nine months in violin case.
Stud tires out.
Farmer Bill dies in House.
Iraqi head seeks arms
Four firemen unhurt as oven fails to explode.
Prostitutes appeal to Pope.
Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over.
Haven’t had enough yet?

No, not everyone was a racist back in 1885 when Sir John A. told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada,

“the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed …”

This report in the Ottawa Citizen says, “Lest it be thought that Macdonald was merely expressing the prejudices of the age, it should be noted that his were among the most extreme views of his era. He was the only politician in the parliamentary debates to refer to Canada as “Aryan” and to justify legalized racism on the basis not of alleged cultural practices but on the grounds that “Chinese” and “Aryans” were separate species.”
So the “A” might be for “Aryan”, not the A-word I first thought of.

I went through a stage when I nearly hurt myself laughing, reading the adventures of Bertie Wooster and his trusty butler Jeeves. The P.G. Wodehouse sense of humour has given me a lot of enjoyment, so it was a pleasure to make a logo for the local Wodehouse literary club.
The Pale Parabolites (name drawn from a Wodehouse line about the “pale parabola of joy”) will meet at (appropriately) irregular times, for lunches at Massey College.
On such occasions, they will soon sport lapel pins designed by yours truly. They will extend their identity with stationery of a similar look.