Someone at CNN really ought to sanity-check their headlines and subheads.
Lost Passmore Avenue
Passmore Avenue looking west from west of Beare Road.
If you’re familiar with Passmore Avenue in Scarborough at all, it’s probably as an unremarkable industrial street that runs in two discontinuous sections between Kennedy Road and Markham Road. But along with the rest of the concession roads in Scarborough, it long predates suburbia: it was laid out and cleared in the 1800s. On an 1878 map, Passmore (then known only as Concession Road 5) stretched 14 km clear across the township of Scarborough with only three short sections missing where the road would have crossed the Rouge River. More modern maps and aerial photos show that Passmore remained a country road crossing Scarborough well into the 1960s, when portions of it started falling to suburban development or neglect.
Although the Passmore name has virtually disappeared over the last 50 years as Scarborough grew from farming township into a suburb, most of the original route still carves its way through the former borough. West of Markham Road, the original road allowance is given over to portions of more than a dozen different suburban roads and park pathways that trace the old road, starting with Gordon Baker Road in the west and continuing to Ketchum Place near Middlefield Road. Drivers can’t follow the entire road thanks to all of the twisty-weavy suburban streets, but multi-use paths directly connect the whole route (except for one block) to allow a continuous 8 km long suburban walking or cycling tour along the old right of way from Victoria Park Avenue to beyond Markham Road. There’s no physical evidence of the original road here other than the straight route through the heart of suburbia.
East of Markham Road, Passmore was never much more than a dirt road through the countryside. Except for three very short half-blocks that still exist, most of it no longer appears on maps and has dropped off the municipal street grid. Yet the old road allowance remains largely open to intrepid hikers in this rural corner of the city. The most accessible portion of Passmore Avenue runs between Gordon Murison Lane and Beare Road, where a line of utility poles stands guard over the old dirt road as it dips into a small valley, passes farm fields on either side, and crosses a small tributary of the Rouge River before climbing back up a low hill at the other end.
A partial tour of the eastern half of Passmore and more photos are below the fold.
While I suppose that's strictly true…
…I still think that my transportation-related carbon footprint is slightly lower than yours, even though my bike is at least partially meat-powered. Also, it’s bad enough that I have to compete for space on the road with two-tonne metal and glass beasts, but now I have to compete with them for food too? Go back to (non-vegetable) oil and stop kidding yourself that you’re doing something noble.
Separated at birth?
Sculpture of Robert Holmes—the “Foremost Painter of Canadian Wild Flowers”—by John Byers in the Guild Inn Gardens and Jack Layton. Can you tell the difference?
Re-name
It seems that people have always named their kids after the celebrities of the day. The impulse is represented by thousands of young Britneys and Lindsays today, but celebrity was a different beast in the past. Take, for example, the list of candidates in the riding of York North for 1921, each named after a famous predecessor. But instead of teenybopper celebrities, their namesakes were a rebel (and grandfather), a prime minister, and a philosopher.
Unrelated: Speaking of Britneys, if you search for ‘spears’ while assembling information for a quick post about a mostly-unrelated topic (because you know that you’d never search for it otherwise), Google is a little too helpful.
Re-hearse
Doctor? Looks more like the Drywall Undertaker to me.
Is that a caulking gun in your pocket?
Must’ve been a wild night.
Untold has-bins
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.
Fruity billboards
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.
Supermarket finds: lolbananas
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.