work as if you live in the early days of a better nation
My late grandmother’s intense dislike of them notwithstanding, it looks like a shopping cart from Rolser Canada could be just the thing for the carfree-about-town. Lugging shopping bags about is teh suk.
The intensely tony Pepper Mill in Hazelton Lanes seems to be the stockist for Toronto.
According to Toronto Public Health, we’ve had more than double the number of smog days in 2005 than the previous record year — and the year’s nowhere done yet!
We had more smog days in June 2005 alone than we had in all of 2004! And it’s all because of Margaret’s right to drive an SUV.
Wendy sent me Iain Banks’s Raw Spirit for my birthday, and I’ve just finished it. I very much enjoyed it; it’s more of an autobiography by way of some whisky distilleries. We have favourite drams in common — Laphroaig and Balvenie being a couple — and we both have a failing for Mull Cheddar, the potency of which can only be described as sinus-clearing. It’s an amusing read, and you don’t have to be a whisky nerd or Banks geek to enjoy it.
I applaud Iain Banks’s stand on the Iraq war, but I do wonder if he’s thought very hard about the the cause of the war. Banks witters on (sorry, but he does so, incessantly) about being a “petrolhead”, and describes his cars in intricate detail: LandRover TD5, BMW M5, Porsche 964 Carrera 4, Porsche 911, Jaguar MkII 3.8l. None of these have sane fuel economy, and fewer of these on the road might’ve meant we wouldn’t have needed to get palsy with the odious Hussein, then need to oust him later. Maybe the fumes — whisky, weed or petrol — went to Banksie’s head.
Again, I was the sole passenger to get on at Kennedy Go station. A few folks got off, which makes a change.
Since it’s bike to work week, I felt very subversive taking my Brompton on board. GO Transit doesn’t like bikes on weekday trains, so basically you’re SOL if you have intermodal commuting needs.
It finally opened, with a big free breakfast bash (which I didn’t know about) and much Transport Minister appearances/festive atmosphere. Amidst all of the party, the GO staff at the station were a bit surprised that a) I wanted to get on the train, and b) that I actually had a valid ticket.
So the train arrived a couple of minutes early, and I got on — the only person to do so. We grumbled off down the line (the Stouffville regulars saying hi, in a friendly way) and got into Union with just enough time for me to pick up a coffee and make the Burlington train. There was actually very little time or money saved, but there’s virtually no hassle.
And just to prove I really did get that train:
Walked by two agitated starlings. A third starling was on its back in the road, legs kicking. It looked like a fledgling, maybe fallen and couldn’t get up. I went over to pick it up. Red stuff had come out its head. A vehicle had hit it. The parents were hopping about, screaming. There was nothing I could do; nothing to pick it up with. Couldn’t dispatch it with sandals.
I walked back to the verge. There was another starling fledgling hiding in the grass, a sibling maybe. It had soft grey nest-fuzz among its feathers, the wide yellow slash of a nestling’s beak. It ran close to me for comfort, then stopped. Not all moving things might be friends. We watched one another, the parents still screaming. I had to leave.
Kennedy Go Station opens June 6. Only almost a year late, but it’ll be welcome.
A wrecker’s in Oakville brought waves of 70s nostalgia. Amidst the other junk, I caught a glimpse of a Jensen Interceptor, the car that — when I was five — was quite the acme of motoring. Wide grille, double headlights. Absurdly long bonnet hiding a vast engine from the US, sweet rounded rear window. Slung low, fast; but refined — an Oxbridge sprinter toff on wheels. You drove this car, you were Ian Ogilvy; you knew he was slumming it in The Saint‘s P1800.
This Interceptor looked, well, intercepted. Its signature rear glass was broken. Its huge heart infarcted, rusted up like Flint. Sad, but like the other dinosaurs, time moved away from it.
TTC strike set for Monday. Guess I’ll be using the Brompton.
Flipping through the Hedonics fallout (you know, the slick catalogue selling semi-useful battery-operated tat that falls out of your weekend newspaper; cf Sharper Image, Innovations and — for both of you that remember it — Scotcade) I see the Cadillac Bicycles AV8.0i. It’s the first time I’ve seen hub gears, hub brakes and a full chainguard on a featured bike.
Sure, I could swap the full suspension and back rest (which looks more like legal means to prevent the Enormous Midwestern Arse from subsuming the saddle, akin to lawyer lips) for mudguards and a carrier rack, but it’s heading towards the sensible bicycle. And I know it’s not really a product of General Motors (whose company slogan currently appears to be losing money, hand over fist), but a licensed product of Kent Bicycles. But if car companies feel they need to license their premium brands to anonymous Taiwanese-built roadsters, maybe something good is happening after all?
We saw lots of these when we were down south: the Scion xB. Thankfully, they haven’t made it to Canada yet.
I thought at first it was a special-needs vehicle; with low sills and high door tops, it seems pretty accessible. But then again, such a vehicle needn’t be quite so horrible (like the old Invacar).
But now I discover that this car is being marketed to the ‘youth’ segment. What!? I used to draw things like this when I was three years old.
We looked a bit bemused when the Hertz guy gave us a free upgrade last week to a Ford Escape XLT SUV. It’s almost exactly not the car you’d want for long freeway driving.
I just did the fuel economy for our trip. It’s not pretty. For the whole trip, we averaged 11.7 l/100km, or 20 mpg (US — that’s 24.1 mpg for UK readers). That means we used over half a cubic metre of petrol. Eek! We’re all gonna die and it’s my fault!
Litres / 100 km is a strange unit. If you do a dimensional analysis (L3/L), it ends up being a unit of area. So I’d be quite correct — if a little weird — to say I got a fuel consumption of 1.17×10-7 m2.
We’re about to hire a car. I’d like to price a hybrid. So I go looking for hybrid rentals. Nada. Well, not quite; Discount said they’d added a bunch of hybrids to their fleet, but they can’t be found on their fleet page.
I walk through a Ford dealership every day. When the Escape Hybrid came out, there were a couple in the lot. They seemed to hang around for a while, but now there are none. I guess it was all greenwash after all, ‘cos I see a lot more Mustangs and trucks selling than hybrids.
In short, we’re all going to die, and it’s your fault.
Says the Guardian: Edinburgh residents reject c-charge plan.
Och well, their loss. I still think the best thing to come out of Edinburgh is the train to Glasgow …
I just watched the documentary The End of Suburbia. It explains, with wit and verve, that the suburban North American lifestyle is something that we can’t sustain. It’s got everything you need in a documentary: earnest Canadians, James Howard Kunstler, Toronto’s wind turbine, Prelinger Archive footage, and even a Cory Doctorow namecheck in the credits.
(click on the image for larger versions)
Ford Canada really have excelled themselves with the Escape Hybrid. It’s a great big huge SUV, but that doesn’t matter because it’s one of those lovely clean hybrids. Yes, that’s right, you can feel good about driving it, because you’re only supporting repressive regimes a bit.
But the best bit is in the writeup (emphasis mine):
Giving back to the environment doesn’t just stop at printing this advertisement on recyclable paper. …
C’mon guys, it’s just a regular car glossy. All paper is recyclable. If you’d have printed it on recycled hemp paper using vegetable inks, maybe, just maybe, you’d be giving something back. But this is just a sop to the car-besotted consumer.
As they go on to say: We keep thinking about the environment.
There’s a huge gap between just thinking, and actually doing something useful.
A Big Pink Car. It’s a Checker Marathon.
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?
So I get my first text message spam today. It’s from NYC_Boutique_Friday3051@fido.ca; so as ye give, shall ye receive in spades, spammers.
This number (416 370 0129) also appears to belong to SJIRadio.com, who bill themselves as “The True Sound of the Sport Compact Community“. This means, I guess, that they have as little in common with me as it’s possible to have.
