We Saw a Chicken …

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  • positively brisling with joy

    I have recently discovered sardines. They used to be the low point of a Scottish High Tea for me, as they’d be dragged out of their oily can and mashed — skins, spines and all — onto toast. This is less than appetising for a hungry kid already fixated on the scones and cake on the table.

    But I know understand why my dad would hoover them up with such gusto. I’ve discovered Club des Millionnaires Boneless, Skinless Sardines. These are like the best tuna you’ve ever tasted, yet sweeter and more satisfying. In a pita, on oatcakes, they’re great. Snacked out the can is good too, if you’re desperate.

    Club des Millionnaires also has a Sardine FAQ, which makes rewarding, if extremely silly, reading.

  • Why I’m Allergic To ‘Cradle To Cradle’

    I’m reading McDonough & Braungart’s book Cradle To Cradle, and it makes me sneeze.

    Not that the content is to be sneezed at — it’s a very sensible treatise on a zero-waste, EPR-based society. It’s not the polymer that the book is made from, either. It’s the fact that the a previous borrower of the book from the Toronto Public Library was the owner of a probably very attractive grey cat.

    I’m allergic to most cats. And this isn’t usually a problem with library books, as paper doesn’t attract hair. But the polypropylene pages of Cradle To Cradle do, and so reading this book makes me itch. I guess this wouldn’t be a problem if I’d bought my own copy, but it’s a deal more environmentally responsible to share a few copies amongst the thousands of library patrons than keep one for myself.

    I don’t necessarily agree with some of the arguments made about the upcyclability (that is, a product that can be recycled into something of an equal or higher quality) of the book. Basic entropy tells you that you can’t reform a product without losing something of the original. Some of the material will evaporate, or the filler will degrade somewhat, or some additional colourant will be required to restore the original tone.

    Some other things that don’t jibe:

    • The book is a surprisingly dense chunk of polypropylene. Polypropylene is made from non-sustainable fossil resources. This is a case of doing less damage than the status quo, which Cradle To Cradle decries as being insufficient.
    • The ‘paper’, while very smooth, isn’t fully opaque, so the text from the other side of the page is distracting. That, and the cat-hair attracting static issue …
    • The book’s printed in China. At the very least, it has been shipped half way around the world, again using a wad of fossil resources. Knowing a little of the publishing industry, it wouldn’t surprise me if the raw materials were shipped to China, printed and bound, and then shipped back for the North American market. And this is a good thing how?

    In fairness, mad props for McDonough’s work on green roofs, and to Melcher Media for giving the plastic book a try. But thinking that a few polymer pages will change the world is pushing credibility to its limits.

    [And I really should temper the madness of my props to Melcher, as it would appear that they’re trying to patent the plastic book. I’m sure there’s some iota of novelty in replacing the form-factor and access methods of a cellulose polymer book with a hydrocarbon polymer, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.]

  • do you … enjoy … knives?

    I think perhaps I do, a little too much. The latest acquisition is a very benign Japanese Carpenter’s Knife from Lee Valley. While fullfilling two (shiny, pointy) of the three requirements (shiny, pointy, lights up) of tool porn, this heavy blade is all about utility. It reminds me of the knives I used to see in the market in Kochi in Southern Japan; brutally sharp, but designed for work, not violence.

  • phew!

    Transit strike averted

  • For the TTC strike: ATU 113 – Contact List

    Just in case the strike goes ahead, and you need to tell someone exactly how you feel:

    Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 113
    812 Wilson Avenue
    Downsview, Ontario
    M3K 1E5

    Phone: (416) 398-5113
    Out of Town: 1-800-245-9929
    Fax: (416) 398-4978

    Note: All correspondence should be addressed to the Secretary-Treasurer.

    — from the ATU 113 – Contact List. Bob Kinnear is the president and business agent.

    You also might want the TTC Contact Details.

  • like the constipated mathematician …

    I’ve just finished Henry Petroski‘s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. While the standard wooden pencil is indeed a marvel of economical mass production, and you know I’m all about the pencils, I found the book to be pretty slow going. Petroski’s To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design is much more fun, if perhaps due to its wider scope.

    While packed with more pencil lore than you could ever hope to learn in a lifetime (like the Henry David Thoreau connection to modern pencil manufacture), some of Petroski’s observations didn’t quite ring true. The books is written from a very American perspective, and when he claimed that the whole world is using a yellow-painted No. 2 eraser tipped pencil, I felt that there was something wrong with his usually objective prose.

    To me, a good pencil is red or blue, or occasionally dark green or plain wood. A yellow pencil is a scratchy and petulant thing, consigned forever to the grubby bilges of a school pencil case. Petroski repeats the anecdote of how a manufacturer produced a batch of pencils, and painted half yellow and half green. Consumers complained that the green-painted pencils didn’t write well, and broke frequently. Curiously, I remember reading the same anecdote in the UK, except the batch was one quarter each red, blue, green and yellow. It was the green and yellow pencils that broke in Britain.

    And a rubber (eraser) on the end? It destroys the balance of the pencil, and at best produces a nasty smear on the page. Rubbing-out is what your Helix Colonel is for!

  • ‘Robyn Hitchcock and His Sadies’ – Toronto date announced

    Robyn Hitchcock and His Sadies
    Lee’s Palace, Toronto, ON
    Saturday May 28, 2005 9:00 pm

    Tickets $17.50, on sale now at TicketMaster.

  • taxing times

    That’s Catherine’s and my tax returns done. Much to my pleasant surprise, I had kept enough back to pay everything. Not much more, but enough to be happy.

    UFile behaved impeccably this year with Firefox. It’s a big improvement on last year.

  • Toronto transit workers to strike Monday

    TTC strike set for Monday. Guess I’ll be using the Brompton.

  • revenge of the daylight-saved

    My body decided to blissfully zizz through my 06:00 alarm, and wake me up an hour later. And since there’s only one train an hour, there’s not much point in me rushing off to get into work no earlier.

  • not top dollar

    I briefly visited the Toronto Dollarevent this evening. While I’m a huge fan of local currencies, this one’s a bit too local to claim the Toronto name — looks like it circulated in about two blocks downtown. C’mon, people, Scarborough’s Toronto too … should I found the Scarborough Lek in parallel?

  • bad scene chesterday

    A very bad thing happened on the subway yesterday. Whether it was a fire at St George, or some undefined weirdness between Sherbourne and Bay, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that by 07:55 we were told to get off the train at Chester. 7:55 is the time that my train leaves from Union station, so things were bad already.

    Me and several thousand other folks were crammed on the platform at Chester. No-one was going anywhere. There were supposed to be shuttle buses, but there was no movement. People were just on the edge of freaking out, and there were ‘helpful’ suggestions flying about. Things got especially unhinged when extra trains came in, making the platform impossibly crowded.

    Then a train came in which wasn’t said to be out of service, so people surged into it. The picture below was nowhere near as crowded as it had been:

    chester, westbound, 07:59

    So then no-one knew where to go. It seemed that many people were locked by indecision, so when I finally managed to barge my way to the stairs (featuring non-working escalators, crowded with static people):

    chester, westbound stairs going nowhere, 08:00

    All told, I was stuck down there for about fifteem minutes. It was very nasty. I’ve never been in such a large crowd in such a small space. Things almost turned ugly.

    It did mean I was nearly two hours late for work (streetcar from Broadview got me in five minutes after the 08:43 train had left). I didn’t enjoy a nearly four hour commute.

  • not quite the worst cartoon ever

    but getting there: Comic Strip in Metro. Every day it lurks, just waiting to suck.

  • Robyn Hitchcock & His Sadies

    Can’t believe it — a special Toronto gig! No dates yet, but Zoilus has the dirt.

  • atomic clock error

    We have a Sharper Image Atomic Big Digit Clock with In/Outdoor Temperature. It picked up the standard time to daylight savings time shift perfectly yesterday morning.

    This morning, though, I seemed to be running 10 minutes late. The clock was saying 06:56, when I was convinced it earlier than that. I check my watch; 06:46. Cooker clock, thermostat timer, microwave, NTP-synch’ed Linux laptop; all 06:46.

    On resetting the clock, and letting it faff about for a few minutes while it listened to the NIST radio signal from Boulder, it got the time right. I guess there must’ve been a duff signal came through in the night. That’s what you get for blindly trusting technology.

  • million meat march

    Yay! I now have more than 1 million meat on Kingdom of Loathing. And I did it all by trading, too.

  • new icon

    hen, from openclipart.org
    Like the new icon? I thought the Atari ST character set image of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs was getting a bit tired, so I found a suitable chicken-related image on openclipart.org. Seems to work in my browser, don’t care about yours.

    I should really have used the Nong Shim Worried Chicken, but there’s too much editing, copyright and glutamate-consumption—condoning there.

    Instructions on how to make a website icon for Unix users are from Matthias Benkmann, “How To Create And Install A favicon.ico“.

  • a sensible bike from a car company?

    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?

  • beware of the tabs ‘cos I’m sure they’re going to get you yeh

    Firefox‘s tabbed browsing really irks me sometimes. I was most of the way through composing a pithy (no, I don’t have a lisp) entry, when I try to close an unwanted tab with the [X] icon. Kaboom! My entry’s gone. Seems I closed the wrong tab.

    With great power comes great confusability, I suppose.

  • 3 years

    Three years ago today, Catherine and I landed at Pearson airport. And now, like then, it’s snowing. We’ve had a pretty good three years as Permanent Residents.