Dodgeville

With the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, opening today, and traffic to my own Dark Knight page skyrocketing over the last week, now would be a good time to ponder a question that’s vexed my curious mind for some 30 years now: would The Girdler be a better name for a superhero or supervillain? And in either case, what would his superpower be? And who would be his nemesis?

According to the Girdler Family web site, the Girdler name—like Cooper, Miller, and Smith—originates with a profession: a girdle maker, in this case. The girdles in question more resemble belts than the modern Playtex variety, though.

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An old article in Slate declared that the Random House Dictionary contains the best definition of velleity:

1. volition in its weakest form
2. a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it.

That is precisely the word (and definition) that came to mind when I first saw this sign guarding a driveway leading to the LCBO store on Yonge Street north of Davisville Avenue. The driveway joins two small parking lots, one that serves the LCBO store to the north and another that serves a smattering of other stores to the south. At some point, someone must have decided that they no longer wanted LCBO customers using the southern lot and the connecting drive. But in the place of an actual barrier to block access, this sign was erected to declare what is quite demonstrably untrue, as both cars and pedestrians regularly cross the unbridgeable (yet smoothly paved) chasm to access the LCBO store’s main entrance.

The bilingual nature of the sign indicates that it was almost certainly erected by the LCBO. Bad attempt at traffic control, or psychological experiment? You be the judge.

A version of this article originally appeared on Torontoist.

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Ah, Etobicoke. The Leading Edge of Metro. Or the ass end of Mississauga, depending how you look at it. This may have been the lamest slogan of the former Metro municipalities, with the probable exception of my own East York’s proud and perplexing, “Canada’s Only Borough.” “Yay! We’re Canada’s only, uh, what? What’s a borough? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, as long as we’re the only one. That means we’re the best! Yay!”

For some reason, this sign still stands along the bike path near Albion Road, ten years after Etobicoke was folded into the Megacity. I recently saw a picture of this same sign (about halfway down this page) taken last year. A fairly fresh tag shown on last year’s picture is a mostly-erased blue smudge on this year’s. Not only does this sign yet exist, but someone seems to be maintaining it. How efficient.
Who comes up with these slogans anway? And what are the worst municipal slogans currently in use in the GTA and environs? Vaughan’s “The City Above Toronto”? Richmond Hill’s “A Little North, a Little Nicer” eclipses that, and Markham’s peculiar “The Mark of Excellence” is worse yet. They’re all losers in their own way, but surely the prize for worst of all must go to Burlington’s oddly passive “Stand By.”

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Now that I’ve finally ridden the Ride for Heart, I have a few suggestions for improving the experience, getting more people involved, and making it safer:

• Separate it into two events: one race and one pleasure ride. It’s obvious that a lot of speed demons enjoy the opportunity to race along the DVP, but they really shouldn’t be mingling with riders who are just out for a leisurely Sunday pedal. With the racers leading the charge out of the starting chute at 6:45 a.m., it wouldn’t be a problem except that the 75 km course loops back on itself at the top, which puts the speedy peloton in conflict with much slower riders for at least a quarter of their ride. At the very least, the racers should start an hour earlier than other riders so that the two groups don’t conflict. Another option is to run the event over a whole weekend: multiple races on Saturday, pleasure ride on Sunday. I’m sure that racers would appreciate this just as much as the rest of us.
• Push back the start time. I mean, really, who wants to wake up at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning to go for a bike ride? More importantly, how many more familes would participate if the latest start time got pushed back from 9 o’clock in the morning to 1 or 2 o’clock in the afternoon? I know, inconvenience to drivers, blah, blah, blah. Spare me. This could tie into my previous suggestion: have races in the morning, leisure in the afternoon.
• Let people start from somewhere other than Exhibition Place. What’s the point of forcing someone who lives in North York to drive down to the waterfront, ride up to North York and back to the waterfront, and then drive back up to North York? Wouldn’t it be better if they could just ride over to the York Mills exit and get on the DVP from there? I saw riders getting on and off at virtually every ramp along the highway, so people are already doing this anyway. And they’re probably not registering to participate, either. It’s not a problem for me to ride down to the Ex, but it would be a lot easier (and fun!) for me to use either the Don Mills or Bayview on-ramps.
• Ditch the set course and just let people ride wherever they want. As far as I could tell, the course isn’t really enforced anyway. A fast rider could probably have done the York Mills–Bayview loop several times before time ran out, and someone who signed up for the 25 km ride could have done the full 75 km without being stopped. Indeed, for all the checking I saw, anyone could have started any route at any time. For maximum effectiveness, tie this in with the previous item: let riders get on the highway wherever they want, ride wherever they want, and get off wherever they want. Riders should pay a set access fee at whatever ramp they use to access the Parkway and that should allow them to go anywhere.
• Do it more often. Why just one early morning in the spring? How about every Sunday through the summer? With different charities running it each weekend? Five bucks gets you on the DVP and Gardiner between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. (with on and off privileges at any exit) every Sunday for three months. I know, inconvenience to drivers, blah, blah, blah. Suck it up.

All of these suggestions would get more people on the road and probably raise more money. If these changes were made, I’d anticipate a minimum of 150,000 cyclists taking part. Just set up tables at each entrance, sell wristbands for $5–$10 and let people cruise at will.

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As you can see by the long lineups at each photo area, the vastly different vistas at each were quite popular with both photographers and spectators.

These were set up near the rest area at the end of today’s Ride for Heart (more about that shortly). No, I don’t know why. I think I’ll file this one in my photo archives under “telling people what to do for no good reason.”

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Shortly after I posted last month about wasteful packaging, we received another shipment of technology. Inside a single fairly large box were six smaller and very sturdy boxes. I could easily have stood on each one, much like I did with the power cord boxes from the previous shipment. Except these ones probably would have been strong enough to use as step stools in the kitchen. Inside each of these smaller boxes were two large, dense pieces of foam. Sandwiched between each pair of foam pieces was a single hard drive. Approximate ratio of the total volume of the hard drives compared to the total volume of the large box they were shipped in: 1:50. Approximate ratio of the weight of the product to the weight of the packaging: 1:5.

Can Sun really find no efficiencies here? The company claims that “packaging engineers determine how rugged each product is, and tailor the optimum amount of packaging for the product without compromising protection during tough simulated transit testing.” I think the packaging engineers are building in a bit too much of a huge margin of safety, especially considering that comparable equipment from other manufacturers is not packaged quite so heavily.

I had been planning to salvage the foam for other purposes, but the office cleaning crew beat me to it. At least I got to make a nice foam tower before it was carted away.

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Case Ootes, just barely Ward 29 councillor for another two and a half years, sends out these wonderful newsletters to his constituents every so often. Earlier this month, the lead story in his Spring 2008 newsletter was about the new garbage and recycling bins that are being rolled out across the city. In four passionless paragraphs, Ootes waxed bureaucratic about the recently-arrived blue bins and the process residents would use to select their new garbage bins. “By now,” it concluded with no hint of rancour, “you likely have had your new recycling container delivered to your home.” Indeed, we were among the last in the ward to get the new recycling bin, and we’d had it for close to six weeks before receiving the newsletter.

About two weeks after the Ward 29 Report bounced into our mailbox, we received a further Special Bulletin, in which Ootes went on the rampage against the very bins he’d just helpfully informed us about:

Last June, in a 26–18 vote, Mayor David Miller and like-minded Councillors voted in favour of the program. I foresaw many problems with the new garbage and recycling bins; that was one of the reasons I VOTED IN THE NEGATIVE. Also, homeowners should not have to pay an extra fee (between $39–$190 / year) on top of property taxes, for garbage collection. The city’s cost to purchase the recycling and garbage bins is a staggering $57 million! This is a shameful waste of taxpayers’ money. (All emphasis in original document.)

The bulletin goes on to level the usual FUD against X (where X is anything that’s different from what people have done or used in the past), claiming that because X isn’t appropriate for a small number of (usually vocal) people, the entire project must be scrapped so that we can do things the old way. It’s funny how this criticism didn’t make it into his newsletter, especially if Councillor Ootes has been as staunchly opposed to the bins for the last year as he claims to have been.

I think it’s completely fair to criticize the new bins over their real or perceived shortcomings, but I think it’s pretty lame for a councillor to pander to his constituents like this. For what it’s worth, I have no problem with the bins, but understand that they can cause problems for some people on some properties. As for whether the big blue bin is ugly, it’s certainly no worse than the lineup of small blue bins that we kept at the front of the house. And the lid is a welcome improvement.

For garbage, we elected to go with the smallest bin. We currently produce only about one shopping bag full of garbage every two weeks, and I only put a single can of garbage out once every four to six weeks. Having a small bin will encourage us to continue to reduce even that amount of garbage.

And now I’m going to go run both newsletter and bulletin through the shredder and line Fletcher’s litter box with the result.

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This is just about the most egregious example of greenwashing I’ve seen. Fifteen per cent less plastic is still 85% too much.

Interestingly, Nestlé’s advertising in the U.S. claims that the bottle contains 30% less plastic, which I suppose is an example of greenwashing even more egregious than the Canadian claims.

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We paid our first visit to a Lowe’s today, stopping in at the store on Castlefield on our way home. It’s just your typical big box store with not much remarkable about it. On this particular afternoon, the employees outnumbered the shoppers, yet true to big box form, the employees managed to be anywhere but where they could answer questions.

When checking out with a credit card, they have you sign one of those digital pads like UPS or Purolator. Maybe I don’t get out enough, but it seemed a little odd to me. I don’t exactly wear a tinfoil hat, but as an IT guy who’s spent far too much time reading the PCI security standards lately, I’m not a big fan of digitizing my signature into the same system that just swiped my credit card.

Partly because no one actually checks signatures any more anyway, and partly because I still remember Zug’s inspiring credit card prank from I don’t know how many years ago, I decided to sign with a simple undulating wave. What I didn’t realize was that they would print it out on the receipt and hand it back to me. Risa can never keep a straight face when I step outside the socially-acceptable box, and neither could I when I discovered that I got to keep a record of my protest against digital silliness, no matter how trivial it may seem. It’s not like I was signing with stick men or hieroglyphics. Maybe next time.

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I’m happy to see that the l(o)oser who sat behind me in Grade 12 English class got a job as a copy writer. I always knew that he’d make his mark on the world in some way.

How exactly does such a glaring mistake make it through all of the design and approval stages that must be required before an ad like this is even printed? Interestingly, they managed to spell it right on their web site, though they manage to misspell one of their company names (”Wed Direct Solutions”) in the footer on all of their sites. Quality all around.

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