Pierre Poilievre is in the news for his election-rigging Bill C-23, under attack at the moment even by Conservative senators. You just know that Rick Mercer had another kind of wipe in mind, but toned it down for public broadcast.

CBC Radio picked up on a tweet asking, “Who ever sings I’m dreaming of a white Easter?”

April 15, 2014

Bad enough answering the phone to obnoxious politicians making robocalls, but hearing Rob Ford’s voice while you’re trying to eat?

I’ve been by before and looked in, but it was always too crowded to try the famous pie at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky in Kensington Market. Until today. All it took was a suggestion from Bill (who treated), plus a rainy Monday to thin the crowd.
Verdict: GREAT pie!. We tried an apple and a cherry so we could taste a bit of each. Tough narrowing the choices because there was blueberry, raspberry and bumbleberry, too. The crust is delicious, fresh and tastes homemade. Generous slices, too. Wanda makes good coffee and Bill pointed out that sandwiches and pizza slices are available if you want more than dessert.

We only had pie, because we’d already lunched at Tokyo Sushi in the Annex. I used to go there with Ben Viccari and it’s become a favourite place for a bento box. I snapped the hand drawn “Sappo…ro” sign because it is new and very funny. The chef means business with that inviting scowl, doesn’t he? I love the TRY It! command, too. All uppercase except for the “t”, for some reason. And look at the attention to detail. Three little arm hairs!

I had to take a break from framing my mother’s art but I’m back in the game again. About 5 more pieces are ready for the walls and I will continue daily until they are all done.

Here’s another one in Helen Andersen Paperclips Series. She made many variations on this idea, sometimes on colourful grids, sometimes in black and white drawings, sometimes as silkscreened cards and even as lithographed postcard prints.This one shows Helen’s willingness to use non-traditional materials. The bent paperclips are touched, appropriately enough, with metallic paint.
Below is a piece called Impressions of Toronto, made when she returned home to Vancouver Island after visiting us in the 80s. The subject matter is preety typical, but the medium isn’t. The painting is done on paper Helen made herself, using a food blender to create pulp from dried grass, leaves and old paper she picked up in her yard.

I’ve read that MacKeeper, a 3rd party utility I installed some time ago, does not play well with Apple’s current (and free) operating system, Mavericks.
I tried Mavericks a couple of months ago, but my iMac slowed to a crawl and I reverted back to my earlier system, waiting for Apple to fix things up. As it happens, there were other things that Apple needed to fix, so the hiatus was not wasted time. The slowness, though, was the real deal killer and that was not addressed.
When I finally got wind of the MacKeeper problem, I became convinced that it was time to uninstall MacKeeper and try Mavericks again.
First, I’ll run it for a while on my main iMac. So far, so good. If everything continues to work well after a few days, I’ll upgrade our other Macs to Mavericks, too. I have already removed MacKeeper from them.
If you have MacKeeper installed and want to remove it, just search the web for “uninstall MacKeeper” and you find plenty of help. I used this link.

A lot of us had the same idea this morning and the lakeside population swelled quite nicely. As I looked out across the hazy water, thinking how pleasant it was to enjoy one of nature’s sweeter days, I picked up a snippet dialogue from a boardwalker passing with her friend. “… and they were giving no thought to cashflow and the really important stuff.”

As the CBC announces that it will stop broadcasting pro sports, we can all cheer. There was never a need to have pro sports paid for by taxpayers. There are plenty of businesses able and eager to do the job.
Some of us (ahem) will cheer a little more loudly than others. Hockey season used to mean that CBC was effectively “down” much of the time. Olympic extravagances had a similar effect.
As CBC shrinks away from popular programming that it cannot afford to carry, will its survival be threatened? I hope not. Audience numbers will decline, and advertising revenues with them, but there is still a useful role to play, covering public affairs that are important to the nation, but not entertaining.

Those who steal our trust are exceptional villains. Look at what happens to us, after we’ve suffered such loss. We must bear the expenses of bigger, stronger locks, live under surveillance cameras and submit to scrutiny like prison inmates at airports and borders.
We add layers and layers of security personnel, watchers watching the watchers, until the cost of doing anything becomes staggering. Budgets once sufficient to achieve results must balloon, to pay for more police, more guards, more lawyers. Auditors must count these costs, to catch cheaters and the auditors themselves must be investigated when fraud is suspected.
How expensive all this is! Resources we need to do productive things are syphoned off to pay for protections we didn’t need when we had trust.
Perhaps our ability to trust has become too weak, for lack of exercise. Perhaps, too, society’s severest penalties should apply to those who breach public trust. It is a very costly crime.

Does it worry you, knowing that Condoleeza Rice has just joined the board of the giant online storage company?
No? You’re waiting for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to get on board before you move your stuff?
George Dubya won’t be joining. His paint-by-numbers work requires his full attention.