We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • tearin’ out a tonsil

    My throat may never recover, but it was fun to almost completely lose my voice last night at a singing circle. Yep, we’re a bunch of hairy old folkies, clutching our battered copies of Sing Out!. I don’t care what you think.

    I did introduce two songs to the group, I wish I was a Mole in the Ground (Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s subterranean wishes explained in a how-not-to lesson about the subjunctive), and the perennial Glasgow favourite, Ye cannae shove yer Grannie aff a bus. I kind of had to busk it with the lyrics for the latter one.

  • 4 beeeeeeeeeeeellion dollars?!

    Yup, it’ll cost $4,000,000,000 to restore the Pickering nuclear power station to full operation. Oh, and five years, too. And all because of bungling management.

    This isn’t just a day late and a dollar short. In 1997, the refurb was estimated at $780m and five years. Now, they’re saying more than 5× the cost and twice the time. Someone please nominate ousted OPG chair Bill Farlinger — author of such classics as The Commonsense Revolution and How to Privatize Hydro for Fun & (my) Profit — for the Giller Prize, since it’s Canada’s Premier Literary Prize for Fiction.

    Look, I’ll make Ontario a deal. Give me the CAD 4bn, and I’ll give you enough renewable energy to make Pickering history. And I’ll only bungle on my own time. Deal?

  • mid summer, 1987

    In UK exams, a “No Mention” was basically where you did so badly in an exam that they didn’t bother to mark it, and you weren’t actually listed as ever taking it.

    I got a No Mention for my A-Level Special Maths. I got talked into sitting it by my mate Matthew, who is a maths genius. It was on my 18th birthday, my last day at school, and a gorgeous day.

    When I opened the exam paper to see proofs of things involving frictionless pulleys and light, inextensible strings, something snapped. I wrote my name, then:

    1) I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it is silly.

    I sat for a few minutes, watching the dust motes groove about in the light from the library windows, then walked out.

    Matthew got a special distinction, by the way.

    I would have liked to add that I went home and listened to “A Can of Bees” by The Soft Boys on my brother’s hi-fi. But I think he’d already left home by then, taking his record collection with him.

  • ottawa pictures

    The lawn chair whale from the National Gallery

    national gallery whale made from lawn chairs

    Some Group of Seven symmetry:

    national gallery canoe symmetry

    Ottawa from (nearly) Hull, Québec:

    ottawa from hull

    The Peace tower, and flame:

    peace tower flame

  • car free in canada

    It’s fairly easy to do without one if you make your housing and
    working arrangements around it. I’ve been car-free since 1996, but
    we’re mostly urbanites, so this may not work for everyone.

    Most of my ideas come from a great UK magazine called AtoB.

    • We live very near a TTC subway station
    • I cycle during the summer, take transit at other times. A TTC
      pass for $90/month for an annual subscription just can’t be
      beat.
    • I have a Brompton folding bike (amongst far too many others, to
      Catherine’s eternal dismay) which rides well, and plays well with
      others on crowded transit.
    • Catherine can use rental cars (I don’t have my Canadian licence
      yet, for various annoying bureaucratic reasons). They’re cheaper
      than running a car if you only need them now and again.
    • Taxis work for getting big stuff from stores. (Unless you’re
      buying an eMac computer, which comes in a box too big to fit in a
      taxi …)
    • All of our furniture was delivered, at less cost per trip than
      even hiring a U-Haul.
    • We get most of our groceries delivered from Grocery Gateway
    • We’ve considered signing up for AutoShare, a car sharing service in Toronto. A few of our friends use it, and find it convenient and
      reasonable.

  • pathologically polite

    It’s 9am, TTC subway southbound at St George. The train is packed (the crowd roared like a lion… no, wait, that was Wesley Willis). It’s the usual crowd — UofT students, Queen’s Park parliament types, downtown suits — not an elderly, infirm or pregnant person in sight. Everyone’s muffled in their winter gear, and there’s no room to move.

    And there are two empty seats. No-one will sit in them, ‘cos they’re too polite, or too passive-aggressive to let anyone sit in them.

    To compound this, they are window seats, and there’s someone in the aisle seats. AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

    Am I a really bad person for wanting to sit down?

  • snow, man

    It’s here. We’ve had dustings before, but this looks like it’s here to stay. Hello, winter!

    Wish I could make like a groundhog, and see y’all in April …

  • how the blog got its name

    We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know that there was a fowl in it! So we carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame. … The film was about five minutes long. …

    Wilson: We simply asked them: what did you see in the film?
    …
    Question: No one gave you a response other than “We saw the chicken”?

    Wilson: No, this was the first quick response— “We saw a chicken.”

    — from “Film Literacy in Africa”, by John Wilson (Canadian Communications vol.1 no. 4, summer, 1961, pp. 7-14), cited in McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy”.

  • The Remarkable Bob Levitt

    Bob Levitt — on a budget of $0 — has built one of the most remarkable and useful websites I’ve ever seen: Toronto Tenants. If you’re a tenant in Toronto (as more than half of the city’s residents are), Bob’s site is a gold mine.

    He’s taken the time to build a comprehensive site, with no concessions to commerciality. He’s even researched Google’s linking algorithm to make sure that his site ranks way up there. His attention to detail — including providing common typos, such as tennant, as search keywords — goes far beyond that of most sites.

    In short, it’s a labour of love. Talking to Bob, it’s clear that he wants tenants in the Megacity (and beyond) to be safely and happily housed, and to know their rights.

    Just as I thought that the web was turning into a global electronic Wal*Mart, Bob restores my faith in humanity. Keep up the good work, Bob!

  • Props

    Thanks to Paul Hart, who pointed me to 1&1 in the first place.

    Massive thanks to official man o’ pairts* Jeff Walker, who helped me set up Movable Type, and who hosts my existing blog.

    If this had been back in Amiga days, I’d definitely write a demo with greets in a scrolly sine-wave message …

    —
    *: Scots for mensch.

  • everyone else is voting, why can’t I?

    It’s municipal election day here in Toronto. I’m a Toronto resident, homeowner, and taxpayer. Yet I can’t vote, because I’m not a Canadian citizen.

    I can understand not being able to vote in federal or provincial elections, but I’m as much of a citizen as anyone else living in Toronto. Toronto has such a vast immigrant population that many people are disenfranchised. Perhaps that’s why the city is failing to provide for its citizens.

  • so long, emusic

    I left emusic — despite me originally saying this — because they changed. Unlimited downloads went away.

    I did download a ton of good music before unsubscribing. But they let me down — they shouldn’t have promised what they couldn’t sustain. Just like Bigfoot For Life, who promised free, unlimited e-mail forwarding for life, only to turn around and start charging.

  • yay, go nettwerk!

    After writing this, I emailed Nettwerk about the essentially broken CDs they were selling. Very quickly, they said they could send me a non-copy-controlled one. And a week later, it arrived. I now have happy CD players, happy MP3 players, and a happy me, ‘cos it’s a good album.

    Someone at Nettwerk hinted to me that they’re dropping copy-controlled CDs because of all the bother. Good.

  • only in canada

    Flash animation: Best management practices for water quality from Agriculture & Food Canada: ROBOCOW

  • found sound

    Hauling my bike up the stairs up the Queen St viaduct over the Don this morning, I found a beat-up discarded demo CD for Estella Fritz. Being an avid fan of the 365 Days Project, I hoped this would be a demented demo for some superannuated wedding singer.

    On hauling it into the office, I was disappointed. It’s generic overly-angsty rock from Windsor, ON. They have a website, alas: estellafritz.com.

    Dang.

  • i think i like emusic …

    Just signed up for emusic.com. US $10 per month for unlimited download of some excellent artists, encoded as decent MP3s.

    Here’s a sampling of what I’ve downloaded so far:

    • The Dickies
    • The Fall
    • Ewan MacColl
    • Jah Wobble
    • Gorp
    • James Taylor Quartet
    • Daniel Johnston
    • Holy Modal Rounders
    • Wesley Willis
    • Boards Of Canada
    • Perez Prado Orchestra
    • Young Fresh Fellows
    • Mayor McCA
    • Yo La Tengo
    • Dressy Bessy
    • The Fugs
    • Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

    Maybe I don’t like them all, but at least I haven’t paid extra to find that out.

  • where’s willy?

    Okay, so I got a $20 the other day in Scarborough inscribed with See Where I’ve Been… Track it online… www.whereswilly.com. Seems I’m the second-last person on the continent to hear about this little diversion for tracking paper currency. Shame about the name, though.

  • it takes a worried chicken

    worried chicken

    To make Nong Shim Spicy Chicken Bowl Noodle Soup.

  • Well, George, I didn’t expect to find you here …

    w

    In a Food Basics supermarket in Scarborough, there’s a kiddie ride that reminds me of a certain world leader …

  • Phew …

    Looks like PAM has been dropped: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/030729/w072940.html