Author: scruss

thanksgiven

chez Bowyer
Belated thanks to the Bowyer family for inviting us over to their home near Wingham for Thanksgiving. We had the best time, and I took too many pictures — the image above links to a gallery.

art by the wayside

top picture
Dumped by the side of the CN “GECO” spur by our house: three paintings on fibre board, in acrylics. Unsigned. They seemed to appear this morning.

Further photos in my Found Art gallery

Uncertain Slogan

Richard Iwanski phoned, and left me with this slogan:

Martyrs for Mammon & the American Way of Life:
a Vote for John Kerry is a Vote for Perpetual Purgatory

He and I are both not quite sure what it could mean, or what we can do with it.

HCP UK drops Eddie Moore

I can’t believe this, but HarperCollins UK are making General Reference senior editor Edwin Moore redundant. Eddie’s a true mensch, knows everything (and everyone) there is to know about publishing, and is everything that was good about Collins in Scotland. He and I used to cycle to the Bishopbriggs plant every day, braving Scotland’s, um, interesting weather all year round.

As we were both active in the NUJ chapel, we used to wonder if the management, err, strategies of HCP UK were those of evil geniuses, or shambling morons. Now we know.

(An indication of this is immediately obvious from HCP‘s website; they can’t spell Dr Seuss, and they’re repackaging yet another bloody commemorative edition of LofR.)

Sharing images between WordPress and Gallery

I like WordPress, but its image handling is pretty poor. I also like Gallery, but it doesn’t know how to talk to WordPress.

Here’s a quick way to get an image stored in Gallery into a WordPress entry:

  1. Select the thumbnail of the image you want in Gallery.
  2. Right-click, and “View Selection Source”.
  3. “Select All” in the DOM Source window.
  4. Paste the HTML into your WordPress entry.

The result is a small image in your entry which, when clicked, takes you to the main image in Gallery. It saves disk space, and it means you can use Gallery‘s excellent image tools.

car bong

A large chrome hash pipe has lain in the rather obsessively manicured lot of a local Ford dealer for the last few days. It looks almost, but not quite, like lawn-sprinkler hardware or piece of hydraulics from an SUV. I wonder when they’ll notice it?

let’s get confused

Clay County Absentee Ballot 2004
No wonder folks in the USA get confused with ballot papers — there are just too many choices.

UK ballot papers are super-simple: list of candidates down the left, list of checkboxes down the right. More than one issue? More than one ballot paper. It’s not hard.

no bank

Our little branch of HSBC is closing. It’s the wee Dundas West branch, deep in the heart of Chinatown. Yes, they’re not very efficient, and the mall they are in isn’t the toniest I’ve seen, but that’s where we got our first accounts in Canada, our mortgage, and pretty much our entire Canadian financial history is there.

I’ll miss it, not least for the Baker’s Dozen donut shop next door.

magical thinking in Scarborough

I was thinking about skunks last night as I walked home from the TTC. When I rounded the corner in our street, what should I see but everyone’s favourite stinky animal, scurrying down the street.

Just as well I wasn’t thinking about grizzlies.

ex-bat

There was a dead bat on Front St. It looked like it had flown straight into the Dominion Public Building; a very solid stone building. And to think that one dead bat can cause all sort of kerfuffle on a wind farm …