First Ontario Peaches & Cream sweetcorn of the year, courtesy Catherine’s friend Dorothy’s mother’s farm. It was great!
Category: o canada
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And I Wished I Could Ride A Horse
This is the view from the back of Molly, a huge gentle Belgian mare. We had an hour’s trail ride today with work. Then we ate too much at a barbecue. -
Kennedy Road, from shore to shore
(yes, there was an enormous storm coming in …)If you live in Scarborough, Kennedy Road is yet another line of stripmalls and furniture shops. But if you look at its route on a map, you’ll see that it runs from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe, through some beautiful countryside.
Since we don’t have a car, and I only recently got a licence, we haven’t been out of the city much. We need to drive somewhere west of Hamilton today, so for practice yesterday, I drove all of Kennedy Road.
Since I know quite how horrible the road is south of Steeles (the Toronto boundary), we kept on Birchmount until we hit the city limit, then headed north on Kennedy through Markham. Things remained fairly unimpressive until we got out of Markham, and passed through Whitchurch-Stouffville and up through the Oak Ridges Moraine. This bit’s beautiful.
Kennedy Road ends as an unpaved road at the edge of Lake Simcoe. Its northern section is so green that you can almost forget the horrors that run through Scarborough. We came back down Warden — another road with similar urban delights to Kennedy — and found it to be just as attractive.
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it does too have a name, Bruce
It’s a Halladay rosette, or umbrella mill (via boingboing, and description thanks to Paul Gipe). -
Just … Look Around You
It’s the perfect pastiche of 1970s “Television for Schools and Colleges” from the BBC. It’s also the perfect reason to own a multiregion DVD player. -
strange exchange
Seeing two church ladies exchange a bootleg copy of The Passion video on the subway this evening …
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Menace on the Roads
Well, they’re letting me drive motor vehicles now. Today I exchanged my UK driving licence for an Ontario driver’s licence (We like our gerunds in the UK). I didn’t know this, but Ontario signed a reciprocity agreement with the UK back in March. I seriously thought I’d have to start from level one — yay!
Though I’ve exchanged a document that was valid until I’d be 70 for one that’s valid only for the next five years, I don’t mind too much. The UK driving licence is a little photocard which has to presented along with a big dumb paper “counterpart licence”. I’m not sad to see that go.
Okay, so now I’m allowed to drive, what colour should my monster truck be?
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WindShare Barbecue last night
We had the WindShare barbecue last night at the foot of the turbine. We had a decent turnout, and it was fun.Stuart Schoenfeld (centre left, with guitar, shaking hands with Paul Gipe) even composed a song for the turbine, which we sang round the barbecue. I recorded it, and the recording may even make it onto this site …
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willow weave
David Hembrow makes baskets. David and I used correspond when we were on the urbancyclist-uk mailing list. I knew he came from a basket-weaving family, and I’m really glad he’s making a living out of it.
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Oops …
I think a CN freight train has just derailed on the spur behind our house. Last time that happened, Kennedy Road was closed all day.
Nice day for it, tho’.
Update, 11:20: Nah, it was just having a wee sleep on the tracks. It was making noises that a train shouldn’t make, though. Let’s see if the tracks make it through this summer.
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Happy Canada Day!
I’m just about to eat burnt meat in a bun whilst drinking beer on the deck. Have fun!
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Images By File Number
Further to ‘The DSCN0001 Project’ yesterday, Ken suggested looking at CIMG0113.JPG from Casio cameras, as “… You might want to try a file a little higher in number. The first might not be very interesting for any camera, you know?” There is at least one blank CIMG0113 there, though.
James added that his method is to google for a topic that may have pictures of groups of people, distort the image in PhotoShop, then paint the results. Here’s an example: Sara @.
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e-mail contact
Since someone gave me a Gmail invitation, I’ve decided to use it as my website feedback address. You’ll find the address on the sidebar (if you’re reading from the main page), or it’s the inevitable scruss at gmail dot com.
I may not check this very often, but I will do so at least weekly. The Gmail user interface is pretty good; some clever use of JavaScript there.
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Say no to Bonsai tomorrow, okay?
Please don’t vote for Stephen “Bonsai” Harper tomorrow. I don’t think we need a very small version of a Bush for PM.
Mind you, I could still be all riled up about seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Or as it’s called in Canada, Celsius -1715/99, since we’re metric.
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I think I’ve got my thunder, thank you
Ah, a Scarborough dinner: mutton koththu roti and a bottle of Thums Up Indian cola. The soft drink tastes exactly like the colas I used to remember in Scotland, especially Barrie’s Old Time Cola. It’s slightly more spiced than that plain old brand from Atlanta.
Thums Up’s rather improbably tagline is: “Thums Up, I Want My Thunder.” After that much spicy food and soft drink, well …
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The Mayor McCa Experience
Since I had no success/interest when I tried to torrent this show on sharingthegroove, I give you: Mayor McCa Live at Lee’s Palace, 18 June 2004.
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It’s gettin’ so you can’t say thank you no more
It’s my birthday today; call me Jean-Baptiste (a fête worse than death) …
Anyway, I wanted to thank my folks for sending me a card and a gift certificate, so I sent this message:
Subject: thank you!
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2004 06:53
To: Mum & DadI got the Amazon certificate and the card — thank you so much!
Best Wishes,
StewartWhat did I get a few minutes later?
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mail-in.freeserve.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 Error: Message content rejectedThat’s right; I triggered a virus filter. So all because of bugs in an expensive operating system that I don’t use, I can’t say thanks to my parents.
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“The Quest For The Rest”–The Polyphonic Spree
Together We’re Heavy
This flash game is by the same guy who did Samorost.
(look, The Polyphonic Spree asked me to do this, so who are you to complain? Sure beats their original suggestion of forwarding the link by e-mail. )
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busy busy weekend
This weekend was so busy, I’ll need the whole week to recover …Friday night was baseball. We saw the Bluejays beat the Texas Rangers.
Saturday was speaking about wind energy at the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers annual conference. There were some great talks, including one by Jim Hunt called “Can Physics Experiments be Inexpensive and Accurate?“.
Sunday daytime was attacking the garden. Being away in Missouri last weekend meant that it got a bit overgrown. Sunday evening was going to hear Shahid Ali Khan with Mast Mast Qawwal Party. Who would have thought that Sufi devotional music could be so much fun?
I also finally got the Beta Band‘s newest CD, Heroes To Zeros. Annoyingly, it’s copy controlled (read: deliberately broken for your lack of listening pleasure). Why, then, did I pay the Canadian levy on my MP3 player to exercise my right to make a personal copy for my MP3 player? Thankfully, the “copy control” is extremely poor, resulting in a slightly slower rip. EMI Canada sucks, but you knew that.
If you are wondering why there’s a strange logarithmic scale at the top of the page, it’s because I found my old Make your own slide rule source code. Until I get round to posting instructions on how to multiply, divide and estimate square roots with it, print out the PDF that’s linked from the image, cut along the line, and enjoy having two pieces of paper to play with.
