It’s not every day that you see a Land Rover decorated with reindeer antlers flanking the windshield and a big red nose leading the way. Or maybe you do see it every day if you happen to live near the owner of this sleigh.
Shamu the Beetle
Love ’em or loathe ’em, you’ve got to admit that small cars like the Beetle and the Smart lend themselves to some pretty nifty customizations. I saw this one in midtown three weeks ago and wasn’t the only one taking pictures. Although it has a Florida licence plate, one commenter on Torontoist says that this car lives not too far from Bayview & Eglinton. That puts it only a few blocks away from the Drywall Doctor‘s office. The neighbourhood would seem to have a very high density of unusual cars. I’m going to have to explore more extensively some day.
Autopsy 360°, coming up next on CNN
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.