Random Wanderings and Wonderings
I toss the vast majority of flyers we receive straight into our oversized recycling bin, but this one caught my attention:
Any contractor who invokes thermodynamics in his advertising—indeed, makes it central to his sales pitch— deserves at least some consideration the next time we’re having work done.
It’s not every day that you read a story about Tim Berners-Lee that doesn’t mention his primary claim to fame, that he invented the World Wide Web. It’s even less frequent that you see him referred to as a “climate-change expert” without mentioning his long history in computing. That would be because the author of How Bad are Bananas?, the book featured in this story in today’s Star, is not Tim Berners-Lee as identified in the third paragraph, but is in fact Mike Berners-Lee. The Star has already issued a correction and fixed the online version of the story, but I predict ongoing confusion for poor Mike: Amazon.ca currently catalogues the book under Lee M. Berners.
Also listed in the Star‘s correction today is a story about thorium, which originally stated that it has two fewer atoms than uranium. Let’s see, if uranium has one atom and thorium has two fewer, would that make thorium, with its -1 atom, antimatter? No wonder people are so excited about it.
The first four Third Banks didn’t quite make it, but the Fifth one got the formula just right.
Almost Perfect‘s website says that they concentrate on producer overstocks and not, as you might think from the name, pre-loved or refurbished food. The food here has not been previously enjoyed or lady-eaten, and you’re not walking into a store filled with seconds and remnants.
This picture is of their Peterborough location (which stands directly across the street from fireplace store Friendly Fires), but fear not big-city dwellers: they do have a Toronto location.
No word on whether the Circus Lupus tickets are still available:
The problem with hand-written signs is that there’s no spell-check to fall back on. This sign in a local Loblaws, which combined two errors in one word, was the very first thing customers would see upon entering the store a couple of weeks ago. Spelling flames aside, it created the impression that the people there just don’t care: whoever wrote the sign couldn’t be bothered to check the spelling of a common word and either no one else noticed or they didn’t say anything. It certainly makes me even warier than usual when it comes to trusting that the food isn’t mouldy or short-dated.
I can’t imagine that he needed the money, but I’m really glad he signed up for this gig: that picture makes me titter like a tea-loving matron every time I see it in the kitchen.
At least one Reitmans store is thoughtful enough to outfit its hubby lounge with some reading material. Unfortunately, aside from the single copies of Vanity Fair, Reader’s Digest, and InStyle, the stack of magazines is made up exclusively of old issues of Car and Driver and World of Wheels. What, no Momentum or Dandyhorse?
Much Toronto infrastructure is notable for its absolute devotion to utilitarianism, so it’s always a pleasant surprise to happen across a piece that combines utility with thoughtful design. This catch basin grate, located just a few steps north of the Leaside Bridge, was installed after the road was resurfaced late last autumn. Toronto has long participated in the Yellow Fish Road program, but incorporating the image of a fish directly into the grate is a nice touch that both looks great (mud and trash notwithstanding) and delivers a message.
These grates seem to have been around Ottawa for a while, and seem to be one of at least two fishy designs currently on the streets of Toronto.
While I was in Austin last week, I managed to get out for a couple or rides and get a bit of a feel for cycling in the area. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect in the way of cycling infrastructure in the city: my cycling friends all said that Austin is a very bikeable city with cyclists everywhere, whereas all of the drivers I know who have been there said that the only cyclists to be seen were large groups of spandex-wearing racers who took over the thoroughfares heading out of the city every weekend. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle.
Like Toronto, Austin is split between a bike-friendly core and somewhat bike-hostile suburbs. There are recreational trails all over the place, but actually getting by bike from one place in the suburbs to another requires you to grit your teeth and put up with a lot of fast-moving traffic. The bike lanes and racks of downtown quickly give way to turning lanes and parking lots when you leave the core. Sidewalks also largely disappear, leaving car travel as the only practical way of getting from A to B in the suburbs. A lot of roads in the burbs have what most people would call shoulders, but what many Austinites seem to think of as passing lanes: what looks at first glance to be a safe suburban haven for cyclists is actually home to lots of cars going really fast with drivers probably not expecting slow-moving bikes in front of them.
It’s hard to tell from a short visit whether Austin has really embraced the practicality of cycling, but I do know that in just five days, I saw three different cars with “Please be kind to cyclists” bumper stickers, which is three more than I’ve seen in a lifetime in Toronto.
One of the major cycling routes downtown goes down Guadalupe St, seen above at Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. There were a lot of bike lanes downtown, both on major arterials and on quieter side streets. But compared to the state of the road paint in Toronto, most of the lane lines were faded almost to invisibility. Several times while riding in a barely-discernable bike lane, I was unsure that drivers in the cars behind me could see the same markings that I could. The sign above, telling drivers entering a right-turn lane to yield to cyclists in the bike lane, is rare in Toronto, but common in Austin.
One nice touch on some of the signed bike routes was an area map, showing not only where you where, but connecting routes and nearby attractions.
Another interesting feature was bike racks with integrated cable locks for securing your wheels without having to carry a second lock around. I only saw these in two locations, but it would be great to have these city-wide.
Unlike Toronto’s iconic post and ring racks, there doesn’t seem to be a single standard design for bike racks in Austin. Many racks are provided by private businesses and can take interesting forms. I was especially taken by this excellent re-purposing of old frames into a functional sculpture.
Just when I was starting to think that Austinites had fully embraced (or at least tolerated) cycling as a form of transportation, I read the above letter to the editor in the local newspaper as I sat down to my last breakfast in the city. Apparently, Toronto isn’t the only place where anything done in a car is more important than safe cycling routes.
I’ve seen a lot of misspelled signs, but never one quite like this. I can’t even come up with something suitably snarky to say about it. There must be a joke here that’s going over my head.