I’ve been drinking beers all night and I am tempted to call this phone number, even though the ad hasn’t run on TV in like a decade and a half.
However, I am still sober enough to know that the number is probably out of service, or it goes to a different service.
But I’d still love to know what the sad story is! Anyone know?
I am really torn on what to make of a new condo being planned in Toronto. According to the Toronto Star, the 42-storey structure would house 315 units, mostly one-bedroom condos. And, they’ll be about $20,000 cheaper than comparable condos in the city.
Where are they saving all that money? By not building an expensive underground parking garage. The Star notes that the planned building will provide only nine (9!) parking spaces for a car-sharing service, but will boast 315 spaces for bicycles. Similar buildings would provide about 140 parking spots.
Now that’s innovative. And, in a downtown area, there’s probably enough density to make it work. The location is right beside a subway station, for example, although it’s 10 blocks from the nearest grocery store.
Unfortunately, the news isn’t all good. That wonderful building is planned for 426 University Ave., currently home to the Royal Canadian Military Institute.
The Institute is a century-old heritage building. From its website:
Today, the heritage building is well known to the public as a city landmark – an Edwardian edifice flanked distinctively by two 19th-century cannons, with substantial space devoted to Museum galleries displaying exhibits drawn from the Institute’s extensive collections. It also houses a 15,000 volume research Library whose holdings include significant books detailing Canada’s military history.
The Star says that the condo development will preserve “elements” of the facade and will provide space for the Institute and its holdings — they even house the seat of Baron von Richthofen’s Fokker Triplane, which is pretty amazing — but in my experience, facades are not the same as the buildings themselves.
Though the institute’s board has approved the project, several members at large oppose it.
Member Brian Lawrie told the community council that in 2007 Vaughan had “enthusiastically endorsed” keeping the building intact, calling it a “rare remnant of University Avenue’s early days as a quiet boulevard dominated by trees, not highrises.” He noted that the councillor had done a “180-degree turn” the next year by endorsing the demolition and condo project.
That’s ironic, because just a couple of paragraphs later, a city councillor is quoted as saying that the development brings the building into “better conformity” with its surroundings.
So let me get this straight: a 102-year-old building, which used to be surrounded by other, similar buildings, which have gradually all been replaced by steel-and-glass towers, now should be torn down because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the street? Where was that sentiment when the first tower was built, destroying what was then a “quiet boulevard”?
I’m all in favour of the car-free aspect of it. That excites me. But why does it have to come at the expense of heritage?
First, watch Glenn Beck, above, “deconstruct” some of the historic art in New York City, detailing for his viewers all the hidden socialist and communist symbols. Seriously, watch it — it’ll make you crazy. Watch while he connects it to the progressive causes of today. Read the L.A. Times’ blog post about it.
Sadly, this is not the new Dan Brown novel.
At least there’s some funny: Check out the logo for the Tea Partiers’ latest propaganda stunt: a “9/12″ march on Washington:
Nope, no communist or socialist imagery there!
Actually, as Rolling Stone is now reporting, they’re deliberately trying to co-opt that symbolism. The general gist of their argument is that they are part of a revolution against the “statist” Obama administration.
I don’t think they really grasp that the communist revolutions eventually became much more authoritarian than the regimes they replaced. How appropriate.
You may know him from his standup or from his role in the Police Academy series (that’s where I was introduced to him — you can see him starting at about 0:50 in this clip from Police Academy 2, when he’s still a gang leader, and not yet a recruit, or in much of this clip from Police Academy 3, where he joins the force (my fave of the series)) but in the past few years Bobcat Goldthwait has been making a name for himself as a writer and director.
Did you see Sleeping Dogs Lie? It’s a suprisingly touching movie about truthfulness in relationships that just happens to involve bestiality.
Now he’s coming out with a movie called World’s Greatest Dad. It stars Robin Williams, who has a full-frontal nude scene — and as Bobcat says, “that’s not the weird thing.”
I just read an interview with Bobcat over the Onion AV Club, where the movie is described as a “another daring black comedy centering on a sexual transgression. World’s Greatest Dad stars Robin Williams as a frustrated would-be novelist who fictionalizes a diary for his hateful teenage son (Spy Kids’ Daryl Sabara) after Sabara dies via autoerotic asphyxiation.”
In the interview, Bobcat talks about how he doesn’t sweat the fact that he’ll forever be remembered as the guy from Police Academy (whew! I just spend an hour watching clips on YouTube, for real) and how his new movie, in some ways, mirrors the memorializing of Michael Jackson.
Here’s a trailer:
But, you might get a better sense of the movie from this bit, in which you can also hear Bobcat’s “real” voice:
Well this sucks. According to Dazed Digital:
When Polaroid stopped production of their Instant Film in 2008, The Impossible Project purchased all the machinery and equipment at Polaroid’s Dutch factory to bring back Instant Film in 2010. Now Urban Outfitters presents a limited edition 700 hand-numbered deadstock Polaroid camera kits. The exclusive Special Edition will include one pack of Polaroid Instant Film along with one of the most sought after analog instant cameras, the Polaroid ONE600 Classic, the last Polaroid camera ever produced.
Urban Outfitters will offer additional deadstock original Type 779 Instant Film saved from the last production runs from the factory in The Netherlands, hand-selected, tested and stored at low temperatures exclusively.
Or, as BoingBoing Gadgets put it:
20th century institutions die not with a bang, but as fashion accessories for hip kids.
I really like Polaroids, and I hope the Impossible Project gets it going. Just because we have digital now doesn’t mean the old-style of photography has to die. I mean, people still paint, right? The only problem is that, with a niche market, producing a mass-product doesn’t always make sense. Polaroid film always was expensive, but it can be worth it, in my opinion.
There’s something about a Polaroid that even an instant-print digital camera doesn’t quite capture.
I will take this opportunity to point you towards the artistic work — using a Polaroid — done by a photographer who shares my name: Grant Hamilton.
I’m no guitarist, that’s for sure, but you’d have to be pretty un-musical to have not heard of Les Paul — at the very least, his famed namesake guitar.
But, unfortunately, that was all I really knew about the guy. So when I read news of his death, I took the opportunity to read his obituary and learn a little bit more. I really enjoyed the New York Times’ “Last Word” video obituary, too, with its extensive interviews with Paul.
I’m ashamed to admit that I had no idea how much of a virtuoso he was. And he was still playing every Monday up until June.
It’s like the East Berlin of our time — isolated, difficult to visit, and a larger presence in our imagination than anywhere else — North Korea. So I was fascinated to read an account of one woman’s visit to the locked-down country. Ostensibly part of a business delegation, Sarah Wang made it her own business to dodge her minders as often as possible, and escape into the North Korean street.
She captured a number of interesting pictures, and had a few unscripted encounters, which I found gripping. She also smuggled 125 chocolate bars into the country, and handed them out whenever she had the chance. Now that’s my kind of journalist!
Her descriptions of the deprivation in ordinary North Korean life really hit home, though:
The men in the streets usually wore black or dark blue uniforms that looked like Mao suits, and the women wore cheap white or gray blouses with black or dark blue skirts. The most popular shoes were made of dark blue cloth, with white shoelaces and white plastic soles. The blue color ran and stained the laces when it rained.
…
Once I walked into a grocery store on the ground floor of a residential building. The store was empty except for three 10-foot-tall heaps on the ground—one of cabbage, one of tomatoes, and one of turnips. There were no price tags and no customers. A middle-aged woman in a black uniform stood behind the counter, which held small piles of peanuts and pine seeds that looked as though they had been there for a long time.
Our guides repeatedly reassured us that the people had enough food and that each Pyongyang resident receives a ration of vegetables and rice every day. They didn’t mention meat or fruit. When a member of the tour group spat out the tasteless meat that was a rare treat at one of our meals, the waitress standing behind him visibly stiffened. On one occasion, I drew a banana on a piece of paper and showed it to a waitress; she had never seen one. She knew about apples, but she had never eaten one.
I don’t want to play favourites when it comes to liquor and alcohol, but Jack Daniel’s was one of the first hard liquors that I developed a real taste for, and I still think that a Jack-and-Coke has a better flavour than almost any other whisk(e)y-and-cola combination.
So it’s too bad that one of the people who has made Jack Daniel’s the drink that it is has died. Jimmy Bedford was only the sixth master distiller at the Jack Daniel’s distillery, and so it was his taste buds that ensured a constant and consistent flavour profile. There are obituaries all over the Internet, but I liked the one in the New York Times the best — it has a lot more colour than the dry Associated Press one. Recalls the Times:
After being named master distiller, he said, sipping became one of his most important tasks — comparing new batches of No. 7 with old batches to ensure consistency. But he was not allowed to swallow. “People tell me I have more will power than anyone they’ve ever known,” he said.
Despite that, he considered the job “one of the most enviable jobs imaginable.”
I think this calls for a pause in the summer, and a slow sip of appreciation.
And you know, even if Jack Daniel’s isn’t your drink, there are probably some pretty remarkable people at most distilleries and breweries — especially some of the ones that try to maintain a sense of heritage or craftsmanship. It’s not a bad idea to take it slow, enjoy your drink, and silently thank the people who make it as good as it is.
Fox News seems to be in need of a fact checker. I want to know if this is simply a failing of the individual in charge of these sorts of things, or if the education system in the good ol’ US is in worse shape than I thought…
Can you spot the error?
So, you’re drunk. And then you decided to text someone on your phone.
If it’s funny, it might have ended up on Texts From Last Night, a website I spent a few minutes reading, until I got depressed by the representations of humanity therein. It’s like being really sober, and watching really drunk people. It’s also a lot like reading people make up stuff that they think would have been hilarious. But you know what, people who submit fake drunk texts to this website? If you were as funny as you think you are, you’d be a Farrelly Brother. But you’re not.
Somewhat better than the raw feed of texts are their crowd-curated “best night” and “worst night” texts. A sample of best nights:
(312): I remember going home with 2 girls. Woke up with 4.
(774): i just walked into a room at this party and someone yelled “dibs!”…
(919): so I was just driving high and I stopped to let a pinecone cross the road because I thought it was a hedgehog.
(the numbers are area codes)
Faced with a garbage strike, the city of Toronto is looking for alternative sites to let city dwellers dump their trash. The last time this happened, in 2002, the trash was collected in parks — including Christie Pits park, which is like a gigantic sunken bowl in the middle of a neighbourhood and thus lends itself perfectly to the collection of massive amounts of trash — you know, except for the fact that it is a neighbourhood park!
I used to live in Toronto — kind of near Christie Pits, actually — and the great parks in that city were one of the things that I loved about it. They act as massive communal back yards for people who live in a dense urban environment. Filling them with garbage is a ridiculous idea.
From an article in the Toronto Star:
“At a time of great economic uncertainty, with many city services currently unavailable, we need our great public parks more than ever”, said Christopher Holcroft, chair of Green 13.
The dump poses “unknown environmental risks to the surrounding parkland and lake and it undermines the very idea of shared public spaces,” the group said.
As I said when I first heard of this plan — why a park? Why not a parking lot? And it seems that I’m not the only one to make this obvious point:
A better choice would be a city-owned parking lot that is removed from the waterfront and parks, the group says.
Well, duh. Of course, filling a parking lot with garbage would affect the city’s business elite and perhaps its economy. Obviously parking your car takes precedence over kids playing soccer, walking dogs, picnics and frisbee. I hate the attitude that all must suffer on the alter of economic development and that parks and recreation are a luxury.
As I alluded to before, dads don’t get much respect. As parents, they seem to play perpetual second-fiddle to moms. That’s partly due to biology, of course, and partly due to culture, but I think there’s a significant (and probably growing) number of dads out there who want to be as deeply involved in their children’s lives as any mom — and they deserve to be taken seriously, and not mocked as dunder-headed fools for trying.
A couple of recent posts on a New York Times blog have highlighted that point for me. Ostensibly a parenting blog, it goes by the name “Motherlode” but the blogger, Lisa Belkin, has been trying her best to keep it inclusive to moms and dads, as well as to single-parents and other non-traditional family types. And good for her.
But sometimes she misses the mark.
Take this post, called “Diary of a Neanderthal Dad“. If you look at the URL when you click on it, you can see that the original title of the post (immortalized in the html) was actually “Talking Slowly To Dad So He Understands.” It presents the first-person tale of a dad who always feels like he is a step or two behind his wife and their kids, making him seem like the neaderthal surrounded by homo sapience. He just can’t keep up:
Neanderdad scratched at the hair between his shoulder blades with a thick finger. Everyone was talking to him like he was the child. His own frustration increased. To settle the matter, Neanderdad did what he did on the hunt. He decided. He commanded.
“Drink only in kitchen!”
…
In the kitchen there was more crying. Neanderdad heard his mate explain to his daughter, “Daddy doesn’t know about this sippy cup. To keep it simple, everyone has to follow Daddy’s rule …. We need to keep it simple for Daddy.”
After being blasted in the comments for posting a story that effectively emasculates dads by showing them as unable to parent effectively at all, Belkin replied:
Hmmm, interesting how this is being read. I thought it was a humorous dig at the Mom-Knows-Best dynamic (NOT a good one) that grows up in (too) many households. The point — at least the one I got — was that his wife was wrong, that the shutting him out rankles, and that this was a way of sending that message with honey rather than vinegar. A riff on the stereotype.
If there is any critique of the mom in the piece, it’s subtle, at best. And the dad-as-neanderthal imagery is so heavy-handed, I wouldn’t be surprised if the mom-critiques were unintended (or perhaps subconscious). Read it — and the 75 comments, if you want — for a brief introduction to the “dads get no respects” vs. “that’s because dads don’t do anything” battle that seems to be the current front in the gender war.
A second recent post was also a guest-post by a father, Paul Hankes Drielsma, trying to examine how to be an involved parent while surrounded by a culture that seemed to put moms first. Dads with kids, he writes, are often greeted with a cheery, “So, babysitting today?” as if he wasn’t a real parent. Can you imagine asking a mother if she was “just babysitting?”
It comes to a head when he tries to take his child to a parent-shild yoga class:
At the top, the flyer read “Mommy & Me Yoga” in 40-point font. At the very bottom, it added “Dads welcome!” in a font sized appropriately for the disclaimers in last second of a car commercial. When I arrived for my first class, the other participants (all mommies) glanced at me suspiciously. A few reached nonchalantly for their diaper bags and removed their Hooter Hiders, designer covers for discreet breastfeeding. It was clear that, to some, I had intruded into an environment where these were not supposed to be needed.
…
“Mommy & Me” is catchy and alliterative, and, in my neighborhood, it’s the standard label for parent-child events, whether fathers are welcome or not. The term is also unapologetic in its exclusion of fathers, and no analogue exists: the top results for a similar Google search for “Daddy & Me” include disturbing news items about horrific domestic violence.
Language, of course, tends to lag behind chages in culture. But culture warriors know this — that’s why we now have firefighters instead of firemen, for example.
As families move away from the two-parents, mom at home, dad working model of the idealized 1950s, there is going to have to be a shift in language that reflects the fact that parenting, now, is more gender-neutral than ever before.
The blog doesn’t offer any suggestions, but it’s a thoughtful and balanced exploration of the issue, and I really enjoyed reading his take on it. Belkin, for her part, seems sympathetic but slightly defensive, writing in the introduction:
And yes, I know I am running this critique of gender-laden language in a blog titled the Motherlode. I have mixed feelings about that title. On the one hand, it is a play on words, and a catchy one at that. It also reflects the reality that the heavier “load” of parenting responsibility still falls to women.
I’ve done some thinking about possible other titles for her blog, and I’ve only come up with two that I think are any good: “Rear Guard” and “Kidding Around.” Both are flawed. “Rear Guard,” playing off how people need to rear a child, but also alluding to diaper changes and the fact that parenting can be a battle, is simply too obscure. Not many people will associate it immediately with parenting. “Kidding Around” sounds too light-weight and almot humourous for a blog that is actually fairly well-thought-out, most times.
Any other suggestions out there?
I’d be curious, too, to hear what other people think about moms vs. dads and how they re treated and viewed by our culture.
I used to love playing The Sims — I would play it for hours and hours. But I never got into a storyline like I got into the created storyline over at “Alice and Kev“. Blogger Robin Burkinshaw has created Sims who have no home, no money, and awful character traits. He’s monitoring their life, and writing touching little vignettes about what happens to his Sims and how they deal with the cards he’s dealt them:
As her father dislikes children, he hates sleeping next to her. In the morning, he’s always the first to wake, and he immediately throws a tantrum and wakes up Alice to tell her to leave the room. Alice understandably responds that they’re not in a room, and she doesn’t have anywhere to go. Then they argue, and Kev seems to blame Alice for every possible thing.
I read the whole thing, so far, straight through in one sitting, although I didn’t intend to. It doesn’t take long. And it’s really quite good.
(via BB)
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been in the news a bit lately, but probably not for any reason that they’d like. The shooting there by a white supremacist is awful, of course, and deserves the news coverage that it got.
But I’m sad that it seems to have overshadowed another reason the museum could have made the news. On just about the same day as the shooting occurred, I read a very interesting article in the Toronto Star about the launch of a new book, published by the museum. The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos aims to be “the first comprehensive survey of all known Nazi camps and ghettos.”
So far, they’ve only completed Volume I, but they’ve already learned a lot. From the Star:
More than 20,000 individual sites were established under Adolf Hitler in the 12 years between the Nazi rise to power and the end of World War II, ranging from the notorious extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka to a little-known network of more than 500 brothels in which European women were enslaved for the pleasure of Wehrmacht storm troopers.
That’s about four times the previously-estimated camp size.
[It] points to the concept of a camp as “a sort of leitmotif that ran through the Nazi regime much more deeply than it did anywhere else,” [says project director Geoffrey Megargee]. “It seems that any time the Nazis ran up against any kind of complex problem their answer was to form a camp. They had camps for so many different things.”
At $295, I’m not about to purchase a copy, but I expect a lot of interesting research will come from this resource. And they’ve got six more volumes planned.
Six Flags has filed for bankruptcy. The amusement park operator owes a staggering $2.4 billion.