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Must’ve been a wild night.

Two things you can always count on the Toronto Sun to provide: great headlines and hyperbole. It’s hard to take any article seriously when the writer refers to “untold tens of thousands” of people, and then goes on to, well, tell us exactly how many tens of thousands (a mere seven and a half) in the very next sentence. And what great disaster has befallen these newly-told masses? Hurricane? Fire? Terrorism? No, it’s much worse: they don’t have new garbage cans. The horror!

Awesome headline, though.

Screen capture from the Toronto Sun web site.

My recent encounter with lolbananas reminded me of a brief craze a few years ago for third-party advertising on fruit. In the late summer and autumn of 1998, ABC ran ads on bananas (including ones destined for Canada), while Global covered the local apple market. CBS ran ads on eggs a couple of years ago but third-party advertising on food still seems pretty limited, especially considering how ubiquitous it is elsewhere in daily life.

Amusingly, “Global’s got it” has been immortalized as a brand of fruit on the web site of a German fruit sticker collector.

Incidentally, I regard the pictures in this post as perfect justification for being a packrat, both digital and analog. Somehow, I knew that I’d have some use for these dumb labels in the future. The scan of the banana label has migrated along with the rest of my data through ten years, having originated two scanners, four computers, and at least eight hard drives ago. Similarly, the negative for the apple picture has been sitting in my archives for all that time, waiting until today for me to scan it. But I don’t keep absolutely everything: Risa should be thankful that I don’t have the actual 10-year-old apples and bananas still hanging around in my collection.

If there’s one complaint I’ve always had with fruit, it’s that it just isn’t interactive enough. I mean, it just sits there on the counter for a day or two and then gets eaten. How boring is that? It’s so old fashioned. If only, I’ve frequently thought, my fruit not only nourished me, but entertained me too. My attention span has gotten so short that I can barely take one or two bites of even the best fruit before I drop it and go searching for some shiny baubles.

Chiquita to the rescue! With three simple letters and a domain name emblazoned across the label, they’ve put the URI back in fruit. This banana is my key to the fun and gut-busting laughter that I’ve always wanted fruit to provide. So it was with great joy and anticipation that I sat down with my banana and aimed my browser squarely at eatachiquita.com. Sadly, there was not a single LOL to be found on the site. I couldn’t even find a snort, smirk, or meh. I guess I’ll have to stick with lolcats for my daily lulz.

I still don’t get how this is supposed to encourage me to eat more bananas in general, never mind Chiquita bananas specifically. My local supermarket doesn’t get it either: two days after I bought this bunch, all of the Chiquita bananas in the store had been replaced by Del Montes.

My search for a complete fruit experience continues.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many movies lately, but I swear that my well-worn bike seat is beginning to resemble something you’d find hitching a ride on the Nostromo.

It feels like months since I’ve gotten out for a good ride but I was finally able to hit the (dirt) road yesterday, heading out into the farthest reaches of Scarborough. With the country roads, fields of corn, tangled meadows, and overgrown forests, you’d never know that you were still inside Toronto on the municipal street grid. But then you pass one of the familiar bike route signs (seen here at the rural intersection of Beare Road and the wonderfully-named Plug Hat Road) and you know that you’re still within reach of civilization:

This isolated corner of the city is plagued by illegal dumpers and it shows in the informal signage along the roads:

In the last couple of years, northeastern Scarborough and neighbouring northern Pickering has become one of my favourite cycling destinations. The best thing about riding there (or almost anywhere) at this time of year and in cool, rainy weather is that you basically have trails and roads to yourself.

I picked up this shiny new hard drive (1 terabyte!)  yesterday and was a little perplexed to see Seagate’s new warranty terms on the static bag. It seems that if I remove the drive from the packaging to, you know, use it or something, I’ll void my warranty. Quite the conundrum.

This bottle represents everything that’s wrong with the food chain these days. It’s not just the general waste and unnecessary expense of bottled water, but the fact that companies have somehow managed to convince people to buy diet water. This is by no means the only diet water option on the shelves, I’m just picking on it because it’s explicitly labelled as diet water. And judging by the diet water shelves of my local supermarkets, diet water is one of the faster-growing food segments.

In a few short years, companies have convinced people that they need to drink water from little disposable bottles. But that’s not good enough, so they need flavoured bottled water. And with flavour almost certainly comes sugar or some other sweetener. And something to act as a preservative. And carbonated beverages sell better, so let’s make it all fizzy. And what you end up with is essentially indistinguishable from pop. I haven’t yet seen caffeine-free diet water advertised, but it’s only a matter of time.

Of course, the only problem with selling diet water is that water is naturally calorie-free, and it’s only because of all the crap that water manufacturers (there’s a phrase our parents would never have heard) are putting into their product that they now feel the need to make dubious health claims. Diet water indeed.  What started out as a healthy choice (water instead of pop or other processed drinks) has now been so corrupted by the drawers of water that the healthy choice has become indistinguishable from the unhealthy choice. Just how similar the two products are is made clear by the ingredients list:

Compliments Diet Raspberry Sparkling Water:

carbonated water, citric acid, potassium citrate, natural flavour, aspartame, potassium benzoate, acesulfame potassium, and malic acid.

Diet Sprite:

carbonated water, citric acid, natural flavo[u]rs, potassium citrate, and potassium benzoate, aspartame, and acesulfame potassium.

So, uh, what’s the difference between diet water and diet pop? Why bother?

But seriously, who needs diet water? Apparently, the people who drink Compliments (non-diet) flavoured water do: it has 90 calories per serving.

Me, I prefer good old Toronto Tap in refillable containers. When I want that extra shot of flavour, I use an old family water recipe: boil 2 cups of water, pour over tea leaves into a small pot. Steep for five minutes. Serve while hot. De-lish.

The people in suite 536 occasionally leave notes to the cleaning crew, usually sticking to a consistent theme. But every once in a while, for reasons yet unknown, they change their minds.

From yesterday’s Star, the above graphic (also available as a too-small PDF) accompanied a story about cougar sightings in Ontario. The relevant sentence from the story:

Some of the animals commonly mistaken for cougars: deer, lynx, coyotes, fishers, dogs, and house cats. Big ones.

Coyotes, I can understand. Lynx? Sure, why not. Deer? Okay, but only if the spotter has never seen a cat of any kind before. House cats? Seriously? You’ve got to be seriously spooked if you’re confusing your neighbour’s kitty for a cougar. Then again, if you have any giant mice hanging around your house, you’d probably want a giant kitty for protection.

Original graphic from the Toronto Star.

I stood on a North Toronto street earlier this week pondering the question that you had just tossed in my direction. If only I hadn’t left my “Non-Weirdos of Canada Club” membership card in my other pants.

This was the second time in about three years  that someone has challenged me for taking pictures on the street. The previous occasion involved a business owner on the Danforth who became quite belligerent after I took a picture of a ghost sign directly above his establishment. By the time he said he was going to call the police on me, I said that I was feeling threatened enough to call them myself, and pulled out my phone to do so. Unsurprisingly, he skulked away when I started dialling. Also unsurprisingly, the business—new at the time—lasted less than two months.

That experience came flooding back into my mind as you continued, “I’m going to go inside now and call the police…” If you’re serious, I’ll wait right here for them. You’ve essentially handcuffed me anyway; if I use this as my opportunity to walk away from your accusations,  it’ll just heighten your suspicions.

Why is it exactly that having a camera and taking pictures in public places marks someone as a weirdo? Or, more commonly these days, a terrorist? Good thing I didn’t have a “professional camera” with me. And even if I am some kind of weirdo, what exactly do you think I’m going to do when I get home with my illicit booty consisting of a picture of a quiet residential street?

“You can’t just go around taking pictures of people…” Actually, yes I can. If I’m standing on the sidewalk, I can take a picture of anyone or anything I can see. I may or may not be able to publish it, but there’s no law preventing me from taking it. That said, there are almost never people in the on-the-street pictures I take, simply because some people don’t like it and I really don’t want to deal with the hassle. Cars and rocks don’t usually get offended when they find themselves in front of my lens. I frequently go out of my way to keep people out of my pictures, and there certainly weren’t any in the two pictures you just watched me take.

“It’s an invasion of privacy…” Cars and grass have no privacy rights. Sorry.

“I can’t just let you come around here, taking pictures of kids…” Excuse me? Do you see any kids anywhere around here? I certainly don’t. I understand that you’re concerned for your children, but don’t accuse me of endangering them by taking a picture of something else entirely while they’re inside a school at least two blocks away.

“Our house was robbed a couple of months ago…” I’m sorry to hear that. Mine was broken into a few years ago and I know how terrible it feels. But I don’t see what that has to do with me unless the guy who broke into your place was armed with a point-and-shoot camera.

“If I see you in the neighbourhood again, acting all weird…” Can you define weird for me? I work just a couple of blocks away and this is on one of my regular commuting routes, so you’re pretty likely to see me again. Carrying my camera and stopping every once in a while to take pictures, is that weird? You might as well just call the police now and get it over with.

“How’d you like it if I took a picture of you?” How do I know you’re not some kind of weirdo? But seriously, go ahead. I’ll even pose for you. You’re welcome. We really should have turned around so that the sun was in front of me; you won’t get any detail in my face with that shot. Oh well.

“Where do you live? How’d you like it if I came to your house and harassed you?” Five minutes ago, I would have been happy to introduce myself and tell you all about what I do with the pictures I take in residential neighbourhoods. I even would have pointed you to this blog. But now that you’ve announced your intention to harass me, no thanks.

“Next time, you should just take your pictures and then leave.” Hmm, that’s exactly what I was doing when you drove your car in front of me and started treating me like a criminal for having a camera. If I’m guilty of anything, it’s of attempting to respond to your questions even though it’s clear you’re not interested in the answers.

But now that I’ve had some time to think about it, let me get back to your original question. Simply put, you don’t know that I’m not a weirdo. And you never will. But I can assure you that carrying a camera, or walking in a residential neighbourhood, or riding a bike, or wearing a purple t-shirt, or even not shaving for a week (guilty!) doesn’t make me any more or less of a weirdo than if I didn’t do any of those things. It’s a sad statement on the state of our society when the mere act of taking pictures is enough to make me a suspect in some imagined crime. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll see you around the neighbourhood again, but it won’t be by my choice.

This figure emerges from the lower part of a dead tree inside the hyena enclosure at the Toronto Zoo. From my vantage point, it was impossible to tell for certain whether the figure—or the entire tree, for that matter—was natural or artificial. The resemblance to the nearby residents was so striking that I have to think it was constructed as something of a visual joke. If it’s a natural formation, it’s a remarkable coincidence.

Hmm. It’s been a week and a half since the federal election was called and just five days remain before nominations close, and so far no candidates in Toronto-Danforth (including NDP leader Jack Layton) have managed to scrape together the 100 signatures required to submit their nomination papers. Who will be the first? It could be you.

Update: The Green Party’s Sharon Howarth just became the first to crack the list. The rest of you were a little too slow on the draw.

What kind of person do you suppose drives this car: gardener, l33t h4X0r, or Australian lothario? You be the judge.

Despite the increasing numbers of people who ride their bikes to work, relatively few people use their bikes as work vehicles.

I frequently pass as many as a dozen landscaping crews on my daily ride through Rosedale and Summerhill, usually with big pickup trucks and trailers hauling all manner of two-stroke trimmers, mowers, and blowers. So it was nice to pass by this bike trailer filled with traditional hand tools the other day. Kudos to Green Gardeners.

All my life I’ve dreamed about combining chocolate and bacon. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I mentioned that very desire to Risa just last week. As if reading my mind, a co-worker returned from Texas on Monday with a Mo’s Bacon Bar to share with the office. Amazingly (to me, anyway), it’s made with real bacon and has no added flavours.

The verdict: mixed. The chocolate isn’t bad, but the salty bacon aftertaste left me yearning for a couple of eggs, over easy. It’s not really suited for an afternoon snack, but this could be a pretty good breakfast chocolate bar. I imagine it melted over a pair of eggs and squished between a couple of slices of toast. Chocolatey heart attack heaven!

The contractors finished the floor yesterday and the cabinet crew took over today, installing all of the cabinetry. There’s not much left for them to do tomorrow other than putting up the moulding and doing some finishing work. It’s almost beginning to feel like a kitchen again. We’ll get measured for the countertop early next week. After tomorrow, we’ll be at the halfway point in the schedule.

His Highness, displaying two of seven shavings from his recent trip to the Veterinary Emergency Clinic, tries to look unimpressed by all the fuss as he lounges on the new floor.

…expropriate your farm, board up your house, and let much of your land lie fallow while we spend 40 years trying to justify building a huge and unnecessary airport on prime agricultural and ecologically sensitive land. Um, I mean, I’m from the government and I’m here to preserve your green space.

(Doublespeak at its finest, as seen on the site of the still-on-the-books Pickering airport.)

The old floor and tiles have been ripped out, and the relocated electrical and plumbing roughed in. In the last few days, the contractor installed the new subfloor and finished and painted all the walls and ceiling. The bulkhead that ran along the length of the wall above the old cabinets has been virtually eliminated, with only a small plumbing vent that ran through it remaining in place. It’ll be hidden inside the new cabinets.

The new cork floor is to follow this week, with the cabinet installation scheduled for Thursday and Friday. Sometime after that, we get our appliances, counter, and sink. With any luck, we’ll be fully kitchened again on schedule by mid-September. With even more luck, the worst of the dust is behind us.

This TTC schedule board (the same one that was put to different use on Torontoist yesterday) smiles at me every morning when I cycle past on my way to the office. Everyone else along the way looks pretty grumpy.