Dodgeville

Doctor? Looks more like the Drywall Undertaker to me.

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Must’ve been a wild night.

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…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.)

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Furthermore, the sign on the front of the store in Guelph proclaims that this is the Original Boxed Meat Revolution. To which I must admit, unboxed traditionalist that I am, that I was unaware of the existence of a revolution, never mind competing revolutions. However, given that national boxed meat chain M&M Meat Shops emerged from nearby Kitchener, the whole area would seem to be a real hotbed of boxed meat.

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Robert Cray headlined a rainy Kitchener Blues Festival on Saturday night, belting out a 90-minute set to the soggy faithful. After a day of off and on torrential downpours and thunderstorms (which apparently scuttled some acts earlier in the day), the skies cleared for good about half an hour before Cray was scheduled to begin his set. After more than 20 years of listening to his incredible guitar playing in my headphones, usually late at night while working on the computer, it was a pleasure to finally see him perform in person.

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I’ve long thought that there must be some provincial regulation requiring municipalities to install pedestrian signals whenever they reconstruct a signalized intersection. I’m all for the idea, but implementations sometimes trend toward the bizarre.

Take, for example, the intersection of Highway 7 and Westney Road in rural Pickering. It’s near the hamlet of Greenwood, with Valley View Public School just down the street and the Pickering Museum a country block away, but I highly doubt that more than a couple of pedestrians grace the intersection on the busiest of days. There are no sidewalks anywhere around here. Yet pedestrian signals and their activation buttons stand guard over each corner of the intersection, just waiting to be pressed by the hapless soul who finds himself lost here. So far so good. But when you look closer, you realize that with no sidewalks and corrugated beam barriers sheltering the buttons at three corners, the only way to activate them is to stand on the road. On the fourth corner, pedestrians have to climb a small weedy hill to press the button:

But even better than the activation buttons are the curb cuts, dutifully guiding people in wheelchairs and with baby strollers into the guardrails and onto non-existent sidewalks:

The whole thing smacks of some bureaucrat following the letter, but not the spirit, of the law.

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I’ve always suspected that having children will drive you to drink. Now I have the proof.

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Strangely enough, you don’t hear much about the need for more and better scooter parking facilities. This scooter is locked up at Yonge & Soudan most days.

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I came across this curious sight out near Guelph this past weekend. The old house, no doubt saved from demolition by a heritage designation, sits in the middle of a large lot that has been scraped clean of soil and flattened for what is sure to be a completely unremarkable subdivision. The patch of soil the house sits on is now maybe 8 feet above the surrounding terrain. The interesting thing is that there’s absolutely no sign of action here: there’s no equipment on site, no sales pavilion, no signs, no building material, nothing. It’s almost like someone just wanted to cart away all the topsoil and leave behind a moonscape.

The view reminded me of this spectacle last year in China.

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Here’s an easy question for you trivia buffs: name a popular Toronto Maple Leafs hockey player in the 1960s who went on to found a donut shop that bears his name. Take your best guess, then read on for the answer.

(more…)

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