Im Readin Ur Blogz

I was really sort of hoping something would go wrong.

Okay, not really. But when Henry asked for a sleepover party for his sixth birthday, and I agreed to it, part of me thought, at least it will make a good blog post. This is how I survive the bad days, my friends. I mine my own suffering for content opportunities. This is how I get by.

We invited four boys to his party—that's four sets of parents who all thought I was clinically insane. I know they thought I was insane because they told me. "Good luck, but you're completely nuts," they said, in one form or another. One parent told me (after accepting the invite) that her son was prone to night terrors. Another told me (also, before I could rescind the offer) that her son tended to "wander" in the night. I had some second thoughts. As the night approached, I began to dread, a little, the idea of one child screaming bloody murder at 4 a.m., waking up the other kids, except for the one who had already gone missing. Surely no blog post can be worth this, I thought.

I know, can you imagine? I thought that. I am so sorry.

A few days before the party Scott insisted that he was going to initiate some kind of pumpkin-carving activity with all the kids. He would have them all design jack o' lanterns, and then he would carve the pumpkins. Five pumpkins. I pictured the children designing impossibly complex faces for their jack o'lanterns; Scott surrounded by pumpkin gore and weeping in frustration. Now that's something to write about. "Go for it," I told him. "But don't hack a thumb off, or anything. That wouldn't be funny."

So. Saturday night was the party, and you know what? The whole damn thing went just fine.

There were no night terrors. No one walked anywhere in their sleep. No one soaked their sleeping bags after finishing one juice box too many. No one got hurt, or cried for their parents. No one had to be driven home before dawn. Everyone got along, slept for a decent amount of time, and kept their hands to themselves.

As for Scott's insane pumpkin project, I am sorry to say that it, too, went without a hitch. Apparently Scott has superhuman forearms and can tolerate gutting one pumpkin after another—or maybe he was soaking his arms in ice water and downing black-market oxycontin when I wasn't looking. The children were a little confused about what they had to do. Scott had provided them with each with a template, and they had to draw faces inside the templates, and they couldn't wrap their minds around this. "I'm not allowed to carve pumpkins," they told Scott, "that's too dangerous." No, he explained, you're not carving, you're just going to draw. "How do I draw on a pumpkin?" they asked. No, he explained, you draw on—"When do you give us the knives?" Eventually he repeated himself enough times and they understood, drew their designs, and had their pumpkins carved to order. The End.

The night was not entirely conflict-free. Henry wanted to watch a movie, but it turns out he is the only child in his group capable of sitting and watching something for more than seventeen seconds. Within moments they were all bouncing around, throwing popcorn and loudly discussing the wonderfulness of the movie they weren't watching. Henry kept shushing them, and then finally declared that he was the BIRTHDAY BOY and needed to be OBEYED. He said it so many times that his friends, who still wouldn't shut up, began addressing him as "Birthday Boy." I don't think they were being sarcastic. I was pretty syre he was going to lose it, but then after a while he just gave up, chatted and bounced along with his friends, and peace was restored. And that was that.

I can't say I would have preferred to suffer for your benefit, but surely something could have happened. One episode of puking, SOMETHING. Instead they were all just adorable. Jerks.

October 06, 2008

A Shout Out to My Pepys

exploding banana mask.

kottke.org

100 skills you should know

Toy Story 2 vs Dark Knight

A Shout Out to My Pepys

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-6-2008

dooce ® -

Newsletter: Month Fifty-six

Last week you turned fifty-six months old. Have I ever told you about some of the email I get from people who are angry at me because I'm counting your age in months? People who point out that no one else counts ages in months, why am I going around screwing with people's heads? You would think that someone who has read my website for more than oh, two minutes? three? would have figured out that I am so depraved that I'm pretty much capable of anything. First I'm counting ages in months, and next thing you know I'm raping kittens because of the endorphin rush. YOU JUST NEVER KNOW.

So, Leta, YOU'RE FIFTY-SIX MONTHS OLD. And I'm not even going to help you do the math on that.

This month we've seen a huge change in your physical development, and once where you were tentative about jumping or climbing you're now aggressively curious. Last week you climbed the rock wall on the swing set in the back yard for the first time, just hopped right onto it, seized one of the grips and starting pulling yourself up. Both your father and I looked at each other like, when did you teach her how to do that? And then immediately realized this was something you thought up by yourself. Which is a whole new development in another area as well: risking death for the thrill of it. Next you're going to figure out how to drive your tricycle down steep driveways. Then you're going to steal your father's pipe lighter and try to set your farts on fire. This will continue throughout your life until one day you're at a Fourth of July party, and two glasses of wine into dinner you decide that life wouldn't be complete without trying to do a back flip on the trampoline. Some people call this stupidity, Leta. But not me. I just call it Learning The Hard Way.

Your hand-eye coordination has also seen some improvement, at least enough that your father will now let you play Super Mario Galaxy with him. For a while you were very bad at collecting the Star Bits, and he would say mean things to you and make you cry. Granted, any time we tell you something that you don't want to hear you tell us we're being mean. Leta, it's time to go to bed. YOU'RE SO MEEAAAAN! Leta, pick up that mess. SO MEAN! I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW MEAN YOU ARE! Leta, you overcooked my hot dog. YOU DON'T LOVE MEEEEEEE!

Last week I had to give a lecture to a group of local business women, and I left your father in charge of putting you to bed. That's nothing out of the ordinary as he and I take turns putting you to bed or taking the dogs for a walk, but when I got home an hour and a half after your bedtime your father was standing at the door nearly out of breath. I asked him what was wrong, and he goes, oh this? Yeah, I just put her to bed five minutes ago. EXCUSE ME FIVE MINUTES AGO? And then he explains that you guys had lost track of time playing Super Mario Galaxy, and he acknowledges that he used to say hurtful things, but something happened! You are really good at it now, and with you on his team he's able to advance farther than he ever has! You could see the possibilities going off like bombs behind his eyes, a geek having given life to a fellow geek, and he asked, "Is it too early to introduce her to Dungeons and Dragons?"

I can't decide which would be worse: a teenager who plays with fictional elves or one who knows the names of every Dallas Cowboy cheerleader.

Recently we stopped giving you any treats whatsoever, not to punish you necessarily, but because I was tired of all the ridiculous negotiating over the number of bites of a meal you had to eat before dessert. So I took away dessert. Done. And it's been a lot easier than I thought it would be, except you're now a lot hungrier for normal food and are always wandering around going, "I want something in my mouth." It's not, "I'm hungry," or "I would like something to eat," it's "PUT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH." It's funny only because this is not a phrase that any adult would say out loud in mixed company. In fact, I think there are rules that say the presence of this phrase in the dialogue of a movie automatically qualifies it for an X rating. But that's how you communicate to us your need for food, and yesterday you walked up to me with a wad of gum in your mouth and said it — "I WANT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH" — and when I pointed out that you already had something in your mouth you spit the gum into your hand, opened up your empty maw to show me your tonsils and said, "I WANT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH NOW." It was such an exasperated gesture, too, as if you were saying ARE YOU REALLY THAT DUMB?

A few weeks ago I started a new routine with you when I put you to bed. After we read books I now talk to you about your day instead of telling princess stories, and at first you were really reluctant to this idea because it didn't seem reasonable. Hadn't I seen what you'd done during the day? Why do we now have to talk about it? OMG WTF? But you soon warmed to the idea, and now we talk at length about every little detail of your life: what you had for breakfast, the outfit you wore, what games you played at school, which friend has a new Dora bike, the game of hide and seek we played before dinner. At this point in the routine I've turned off the light and I'm lying next to you as you recount your day, and most of the time you're accidentally hitting me in the face as you swing your arms wide to show JUST. HOW. MUCH. you loved that game of hide and seek. I guess you could say I started this routine with the hope that we could continue to talk this way throughout your life, or that it at least wouldn't be foreign to you to share such details with me later on. Maybe this is my way of letting you know as early as I can that this is the type of relationship I want to cultivate with you, and that I will always be interested in the highs and lows, the exciting and the mundane, all of it. You will always be one of the most interesting people in the world to me.

Even when you're in a mood like the one you were in last night, when you finished telling me about the silly faces you'd made at Dad over dinner and then said, "I'm tired, can you please leave?" ESPECIALLY THEN.

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Mayor outlines 2009 budget priorities

Mayor David Miller has formally laid out his priorities for the City of Toronto’s 2009 operating and capital budgets in an October 1 letter to City Manager Shirley Hoy and Budget Chief Shelley Carroll.

In the correspondence [PDF], Mayor Miller lays out clear but challenging guidelines for what the almost $10 billion financial plan should look like.

Top priority for the Budget Committee and civil service is “support(ing) the ongoing completion of (the Mayor’s) mandate.” For 2009, this includes:

garfield minus garfield

Photo

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Your walls can look like a subway platform

Toronto keeps producing interesting homages to our public transit heritage despite the TTC’s total lack of appreciation (or attention): Spacing’s subway buttons, the TTC font, the subway anagram map, historical type and tile tours, and now wall decals.

Derek Watson has created a handful of designs that replicate the appearance of subway platforms (currently available: St. Clair, Queen’s Park, Wellesley, Union, Spadina, Pape, “Northbound-Southbound”, and “Next Station St. George”). Watson says all 69 stations will be available soon. Purchasing a design will run you anywhere from $25 to $40.

finslippy

I am not at all afraid of my cat.

My cat tried to kill me. But I'm sure I had it coming.

It all started when I mocked my cat's ass on Twitter. Izzy the cat is—well, she's become a big girl. She rapidly morphed from an adorable teacup-sized kitten to a hulking mass who causes the house to shake when she jumps off a chair. Here is what she was:

And here's Izzy now!

She actually looks relatively slender here, due no doubt to her slimming black hue. She's way more of a moose than you can tell from the picture. In real life, she causes people to exclaim in surprise when they see her. She's not small.

I don't even know how she fits on this windowsill.

I know that this is partly our fault. Or at least it's our fault for not addressing the issue as soon as we noticed her rapid expansion. It occurred, as these things do, after she was spayed. When she figured there was no reason to keep up her girlish figure. She let herself go, and we let her do it.

Look, now her back-fat is causing her to slip:

So lately it seems that she is too heavy to clean herself. Specifically, she cannot reach her butt. And this is disgusting. I even tried cleaning her myself—out of love, yes, but mostly disgust—but the fur is all matted, and now there's no getting it out. It's clear that we need to take her to the vet and get the whole cat-butt problem worked out. She's also apparently incapable of cleaning her back, now, and let's face it, it's really hard to pet her when she's like this. Our love, apparently, is conditional, and the condition is "must not have pooplets stuck to ass when you rub our legs for a pet."

Oh wait, I just found a picture in which her enormous girth is revealed.

NOW YOU SEE. Quick, look away—I can't be sure what prolonged viewing of her Rasputin-like gaze would do to your brains.

I feel bad for her, but that didn't stop me from writing a Twitter about her ass. And not a few minutes later, I walked into the kitchen, and Izzy dashed in front of the doorway, causing me to fly across the room, landing on both wrists and one knee. I had to lie there for a while. Henry came in and offered to kiss my knee, but I demurred. Over the next few days, my knee turned all kinds of colors. My parts hurt. But it could have been much worse.

I have never almost been killed by a cat before, and it's a humbling experience. I can only conclude that Izzy can read, and that she's following me on Twitter. She's probably reading my blog. So I just want to say here that 1) my cat is beautiful, no matter what condition her ass is in, and 2) I was wrong to publicly mock her. Oh, and 3) I am sure that if we take her to the vet it will be so she can be admired, and not to have her hindquarters shaved and a tasteless diet food prescribed. In conclusion, my cat is beautiful. A big, beautiful beast.

If I don't post in a couple of days, you'll know that she didn't accept my apology.

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

ELECTION 2008: Campaign signs in public spaces

Green Party candidate Ellen Michelson has decided not to put up campaign signs in public spaces throughout her riding of Toronto Centre. “Public space is everyone’s”, she says, and she feels uncomfortable altering that space without any kind of agreement process. Instead she thinks that campaign volunteers who go door-to-door get the Green message across, along with information that can be found on the Internet.

Rami Tabello of illegalsigns.ca (who was profiled in the Summer/Fall issue of Spacing) disagrees completely with Michelson, however, calling her “completely misguided.” Tabello says the system for placing signs on the public road allowance is an important part of Toronto’s democracy and suggests that perhaps the Toronto Centre candidate just can’t afford the signs. Michelson says not placing signs on public property is part of the Green Party’s philosophy of “building consensus about our community.”

Under the Toronto Municipal Code, election signs on public property can be posted as long as the person posting the signs pays a refundable $250 deposit to the city. This, partnered with very specific rules [PDF] on the placement of the signs, is already far too strict according to Tabello.

“Signs need monitoring,” Michelson counters. “People who post signs in public places can’t always monitor their condition.” Campaign signs placed on private property, also known as “bag signs”, are completely recyclable. Michelson even mentioned a case of carrying items to her campaign office in the upside-down bag of her own sign. And the wire part, she says, can be used for gardening.

dooce ® -

2009 Wooden Calendar

This is an adorable wooden desk calendar with unique designs for every month printed on eco-friendly sustainably harvested wood. This will be one of several calendars I use in 2009 since having a child made my brain go missing. I used to be able to maintain my daily schedule in my head, never had to write down a single thing, then I had a baby and couldn't remember my own name. Now I have calendars in every room, and I use the annual Chuck calendar as a dumping ground for every note I take. For those of you who are interested, yes, there will be a 2009 Chuck calendar, look for it at the end of this month!

explodingdog-pictures

explodingdog drawings for monday

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Dalian: Heritage and Spectacle in China

Looking towards Friendship Square. The ball is supposedly supposed to resemble a soccer ball, and lights up in LED animations at night.

While I was in Changchun, I took a 48-hour side trip to the Manchurian city of Dalian (大连), traveling there and back by train. In Dalian, I had the opportunity to see the city, which contrasted greatly with Changchun in almost every possible way. The more restrained parts of the city, surrounding the city centre, felt similar to that of a North American west coast city, but the new booming waterfront felt a bit like Dubai.

A friend of a friend met me at the train station (more about my trip below the fold) and then we drove out to the Yellow Sea coastline. Immediately, I felt like I was in an eastern Vancouver, (with those bits of European monumentalism and San Francisco thrown in). There’s many tunnels under mountains connecting parts of the city together. Behind the older city, along the water, are several impressive parks, including a ‘magnetic hill’. The city is a financial centre, and the national offices of many Japanese and Korean firms, and there was little little of the visible poverty that you see in Changchun. Many buildings from the Russian and Japanese eras remain.

Dalian has a very attractive downtown, and indeed, is one of the few cities in China to have an easily identifiable city centre. However, I have been told that the downtown office towers, while impressive, are half-empty, but yet they build more.

The bank headquarters are on all corners of Zhongshan Square, in the city’s financial district, with new towers set behind Russian and Japanese-era low-rise structures. It’s a good example of heritage preservation in a country with a spotty record of it in its fast-changing urban centres. (more…)

Montréal Monday: Stolen sidewalks, suburban exodus, sucky trash, and more

Each Monday, we bring you some of the popular posts from our sister blog, Spacing Montréal. We’ll keep an eye open for topics and discussions that are pertinent to current public space issues in Toronto.

• Most Torontonians know how crowded a sidewalk can get, especially when obstacles like restaurant tables are thrown into the mix. Here’s a look at a Montréal restaurant that wrestled some coveted walking space for a streetside patio.

• Sparked by a recent ad that’s aimed at keeping young Montréalers from moving out to the suburbs, Alanah Heffez crunches some numbers to see if the high price of living of downtown is really more expensive than in the surrounding suburban community.

• Underwhelmed by Astral’s plans for Toronto’s garbage bins? Wishing for a more Orwellian disposal system? Well Montréal City Hall has just approved a vaccuum-powered collection system for the Quartier des Spectacles area that will whisk garbage, recyclables, and compostables from street level receptacles.

• With Montréal drawing twice as much water than other Canadian cities and losing half of it through leaky pipes, Anders Rasmusson looks at the city’s wasteful water system and how the city plans on putting a stop to the flood of excessive water use.

• In a follow-up to an August posting about the hydro-electrical industry’s environmental impact, Alanah Heffez writes about a displaced Cree community and the changing landscape around a hydro complex powering Montréal.

explodingdog-pictures

explodingdog drawing pictures, Monday morning

10.06.08
Happy monday morning!
I am drawing right now, so send me titles. and maybe if I wake up enough I can draw something good.
sambrown@explodingdog.com

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Monday’s headlines

Another Word for Nerd

Sunday Night Computer Surgery

It’s been a busy hour or so, and the living room is a mess. I need to clean tomorrow.

I unpacked the Sun Ultra 20 (new in the box, but two years old), updated its BIOS, and installed 2G of RAM. I then took out its Socket939 Opteron 144 CPU and set it aside.

I took my old gaming machine, took out its Socket939 Athlon64 X2 3800+ CPU, installed that processor in the Ultra 20, and verified that everything worked.

I took the Opteron 144 from the Ultra 20, installed it in the old gaming machine, and verified that everything worked.

When my parts for the new gaming machine (Intel DG31PR motherboard, E5200 CPU, 4G RAM) arrive on Wednesday, I’ll take the motherboard/CPU/RAM out of the old gaming machine and install the new parts, along with a GeForce 9500 video card that I’ve had sitting here waiting. The old GeForce 7600 card will go into the Ultra 20, which currently just has onboard Rage XL video.

This will give me a (for the first time) current-generation gaming machine with a decent video card, while at the same time giving me a machine to play with Solaris 10 and VMWare on.

The ASRock board, CPU, and 2G RAM will be given to a friend who lost his system in a power surge during the recent hurricane.

Rands In Repose

Horrible

High school journalism is where I discovered this. Mrs. Wickett kept bringing stories to me in my junior year, "Needs a clever headline." I'd read the story and throw out a terse, clever headline.

No clue where this ability come from. If I actually think about how I pick the words and construct the idea, the ability vanishes. The less I know about it, the better.

I've been riding this talent for years. Turns out the ability to summarize isn't only handy for for writing headlines; it's useful in meetings, too. "He just said that, you think this, let's move on and stop saying the same thing over and over again."

It was this appreciation of summarization that I took into my first executive product presentation at the last gig. 10th floor of corporate headquarters. Four VPs and their minions surrounding the table. My thought, "Wow them with crisp, clean, and clever thoughts. Alliteration. Witty. Headlines."

"This is the product. Here are the 20 clever phrases to describe it. Thank you very much!"

Silence. 30 seconds of awkward silence followed by the VP of Marketing breaking the tension, "What exactly are we reviewing here?" The next five minutes were less pleasant as the room realized I was done and all I'd accomplished was filling the air with clever alliterative phrases. There was no obvious strategy behind the headlines.

The Russian Lit Major was standing outside my door as I limped back from the beat down, "How'd that feel?"

You are a bell curve. A standard distribution. At one end of the curve, you have your natural talents. These are the things which come naturally to you. You're uniquely good at them and you're not quite sure why. At the other end of the curve, you have your natural deficiencies and, while I am an optimist and I do believe you can learn your way through just about anything, you're genetically predisposed to be pretty bad at this thing.

Now, chances are, you are a horrible at a whole bunch of things, but I want to focus on one thing. It's the thing which will have the most impact on your career. By being bad at this thing, you limit your career growth.

I'm going to make a leap and assume that you've already identified your horrible. At some point in the past, you realized you were bad at this thing. "I am unable to read people." "I love to program, but I am a lousy architect." "I dress like a goofball." Whatever your horrible realization was, you realized, relative to the rest of the world, you were deficient and you took one of two paths.

The first path. You structured your day and your life so that you wouldn't stumble on this deficiency. Bad programmer, but deeply technical? Ok, you stuck with QA. Unable to read people? Ok, stick with code, don't manage. Horrible fashion sense? Right so, you're not first in line for customer visits. As path of least resistance strategies go, this can work. You can sit there and hide from the horrible, but my thought is, if you're reading this weblog, you chose the other path and you attacked the horrible.

Your thought, "I refuse to suck at this," so you took the other path and forced yourself to learn through the horrible.

Educating yourself in your deficiencies. Learning. Researching. I'm a fan. There is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment when you know that Darwin is rooting against you. I would go as far to say that success at overcoming the horrible is far sweeter than success when you know what the hell you're doing.

"You have a product there, but your problem is that you believe that since you can see, everyone else can. They can't. You need to stitch together the details of how you discovered the product and you need to say it in the language of executives. I'll show you."

That night, she took my presentation home and ripped it to shreds. The following morning she sat me down with a completely revised presentation and she walked me through, slide by slide, pointing out that while I was making fine points, I was skipping over essential details the executives needed to hear. My thoughts were big, but they lacked meat and executive messaging.

It sucked. It's one thing to know you're horrible at the thing, but discovery of this horribleness by the rest of the team is whole other magnitude of embarrassment.

Except the slides were better. My messages were still there, but the deck made sense to someone other than me. Two weeks later when we presented again, the questions were enthusiastic, not problematic. I was saying the same thing, but the additions of the Russian Lit Major's natural ability made my message clear.

There's a defining moment in your career when you choose to trust someone beside yourself. I'm not talking about trusting them with the small stuff: "Hey, can you fix this bug for me?" I'm talking about big trust, "Hey, your design sense is 10x mine, what the hell is wrong with this dialog? Be brutal."

It's tricky to leave that swell little island of you. It's hard to suck up your pride and acknowledge there are those who excel where you suck, but whether you're an individual or a manager, your job is to scale at what makes you great. Yes, you want to fill your professional experience gaps, but if you work where I work, you're in a hurry. Getting anything done needs to be balance of your natural talent and your ability to find and leverage the talents of those around you.

Putting big trust on someone else, you're solving three problems: you're increasing the chance you'll get your project done, you're building a strong team, and, oh yeah, you get to sit there and watch and learn as someone deftly works in a place where you're horrible.

By watching someone be great, you'll learn just like I learned. I don't need the Russian Lit Major for every presentation, but I know whenever I want to be great, I'll go and find her.

October 05, 2008

finslippy

Get your Cringe book right here!

Okay, people: Tomato Nation is kicking my ass all over town. This cannot stand. If you want to see me dress as Pat Benatar, you've got to take action. I'm not asking for much. Seriously, if everyone reading this donated five dollars right now, I could pull ahead by the end of the day. And you know what that means! Headbands! Scott dressed up as a sleazy dance-parlor manager! I've already said too much!

Because it seems that love being a battlefield is not incentive enough, here's this:

If you donate in the next three hours (That's 11:30 am EST - 2:30 am EST) and email me with a receipt of your donation, you will be in the running for one of ten copies of Cringe, the hilarious anthology of teen angst edited by Sarah Brown. (Thank you, Sarah and Random House, for the gifts!) I will have a third party choose randomly from the emails I receive.

Important note: in order to be considered, your email must have the subject line CRINGE ME! Thank you in advance, lovely reading people.

P.S.: there's a new Alphamom column up. It's about the vice-presidential debate. I have opinions.

WFMU's recent playlists from Coffee 2 Go with Noah

WFMU Playlist: Coffee 2 Go with Noah from Sep 8, 2008

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

NUIT BLANCHE: impressions, part II

I found this year’s Nuit Blanche a little underwhelming, but that could be due to my plan of just winging it. I didn’t have a schedule or “must-see” installations, so I have only myself to blame for not seeking out more venues (or referring to the program that was handed out).

I started in Parkdale and wandered east into the core. Though not really an installation, the TTC brought out a PCC streetcar — vintage modernist design — which took riders on a loop of the west side. If anything it added a tad or surrealness to the evening.

I didn’t find any of the exhibits too compelling (though there was topless modern/Butoh dance at Queen and Cowan, Bridging the Gap by Matthew Romantini) until I got under the bridge at Queen and Dufferin. The program didn’t have a listing for this installation: the steps leading up to the old Parkdale train station — long closed off to public use — were lit up, which also seemed to nicely glamourize the wall’s graffiti. Music by a handful of noise artists added a weird soundtrack to the experience.

From any angle, the installation You Will Change Everything by David Rokeby looked amazing. The changing colours in thew window of the Drake Hotel really made this piece come to life.

Another unofficial installation was the resurrection of the Hug Me Tree at Queen and Peter. The graffiti artist Elicser spent the week paper-maché-ing a replica of the Hug Me Tree that fell over in early-August (check out Spacing’s blog posts here and here). He then spent the night painting it in his signature style. We’ll see how long the tree lasts in this location.

I ended my night at City Hall watching the Blinkenlights installation. It was a truly whimsical use of the building and I loved seeing GAME OVER spelled out periodically. One two occasions we witnessed one of the artists silhouetted in a window, possibly fixing an uncooperative panel sheet (read Shawn Micallef’s post on the prep work by Blinkenlights). And as Dylan Reid mentions in the previous Nuit Blanche post, it was great to personally experience the podium and elevated walk ways that surround Nathan Phillips Square.

finslippy

And so it begins.

The DonorsChoose 2008 Blogger's Challenge has begun. And lo, I am asking you for money.

I must have all kinds of nerve, asking for money at a time like this. The banks are imploding. Our retirement accounts are too depressing to look at. Gas is expensive. Groceries are ridiculous. Buying a nice pair of shoes is, tragically, out of the question. We're all suffering. So! What better time to contribute a little something to the greater good?

Take a look at my challenge page . I've listed a whole bunch of literacy projects, but by no means are those the only projects I want to help fund. If there's a project you want me to include on my challenge page, please speak up, and I'll add it. If there's a topic of interest you want to see represented—science, math, gym, you name it—tell me, and I'll find some projects that fit.

I'm going to give away a whole bunch of copies of "Sleep is for the Weak," and possibly there are some other gifts coming as well. And I have a generous matching offer—if I make it over $25K, the next $12.5K will be matched.

Last year Tomato Nation won the blogger challenge, raising over $100,000 (let us repeat—that's one hundred thousand dollars) and in return, she spent the day dressed as a tomato. She also danced around Rockefeller Center. As a tomato. I bow to her excellence. But now I must destroy her.

If I win the Blogger Challenge, I will reenact Pat Benatar's video "Love is a Battlefield" in its entirety. (EDITED TO ADD: I forgot to thank brilliant reader Jessica Torres for the idea. Thank you, Jessica! I think!)

Imagine this, if you can.

Imagine the costumes. Will there be dancing? You bet your ass. I will use my family as cast members. Yes, that includes Henry. Will he be one of the dancers? Who can say? I can. But I won't, yet. My husband is a talented filmmaker, people. This could be really funny.

But I need to win first. So. You know what you have to do.

Let's get started.

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

NUIT BLANCHE: impressions

Words on steel drums (Euphemisms for the intimate enemy, Ruark Lewis), Liberty Village

For Nuit Blanche this year, I focused on Liberty Village (”Zone C”). This year’s format, which was more focused both in terms of geography and the choice of artworks, seemed to me to be an improvement over last year. The smaller number of works, more consciously curated, seemed to result in large and/or interactive projects that worked well on the public scale of the night.

Huge dartboard (I, the world, things, life by Jacob Dahlgren), Liberty Village

The projects themselves also seemed to be better executed than last year, when some of them seemed kind of (please pardon the term) half-assed. Even ones this year that sounded pretty basic when described (e.g. “SMASH! Dropping stuff” — which is pretty much self-explanatory) often turned out to be more complex and fully-realized when you actually saw them. And it was easier to see a larger number of the major works because they were all in reasonably focused geographic areas.

Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace, where people wrote their wishes on tags and hung them from trees, was another project that sounded pretty simple but actually worked out to be quite beautiful.

After Liberty Village, I cycled downtown (”Zone A”) to enjoy Stereoscope by Project Blinkenlights, where they turned City Hall into a huge interactive pixel screen — including a massive live game of Pong (people could dial in to join a game, and control the paddles with their cellphones).

What I didn’t know is that they would also open up the City Hall gangway, podium level and walkway (you can faintly see people walking up the gangway in the photo above). It was cool to finally see this part of City Hall. A closer look at the back made me appreciate the details of the architecture a lot more — the concrete is really finely decorated — and it created some interesting views.

It made me wonder why these parts of the City Hall building are not open all the time. I had thought it was because they weren’t properly maintained, but obviously they were safe enough for Nuit Blanche. They would make an appealing addition to the public space of City Hall.

The wonderful thing about Nuit Blanche is just how many people are out on the streets walking around. It is like a brief glimpse of a potential ideal of urban vibrancy. Given that it’s one of the biggest pedestrian events of the year, what remains particularly baffling is how little the streets are closed to private motor vehicles (there were a couple of blocks closed off in Liberty Village, where there is little vehicle traffic anyway, but not a lot). After all, they close off main streets for an entire day for massive pedestrian events like Taste of the Danforth. Pedestrians in Nuit Blanche are literally spilling off the sidewalks, which are not large enough to accommodate their numbers. Why not close off to private vehicles the roads that are most heavily used, leaving just space for transit and bikes? Only a tiny fraction of the people on the street are moving by car.

The most absurd situation was on Queen West in front of Osgoode Hall, right beside City Hall, where the city put up barriers along the narrow sidewalk to keep the tens of thousands of people travelling there during the night from spilling out onto the road and disturbing the few hundred people driving by there in a car. Probably the idea was to prevent cars from blocking the streetcar — but why not just keep cars out of this stretch completely, and temporarily widen the sidewalk by putting these barriers in the midst of the right lane (leaving just enough space for bikes)?

It’s great to see the way pedestrians rule the streets of downtown Toronto for at least this one night of the year.

NUIT BLANCHE: Open call for Yeahs & Nahs

So according to Toronto Special Events almost a million folks apparently took in Nuit Blanche last night.

At first to me that seemed a little hard to believe as crowds seemed quite sparse in Zone B… though I guess Yonge-Dundas Square made up for it.

I myself did a rather quick tour of some of what promised to be the big sights of Nuit Blanche—knowing full well, of course, that many of the best Nuit Blanche experiences happen when you have time to take in stuff on the fly. In any case, here’s my starter yeahs & nahs. I look forward to hearing what other people thought and experienced.

Yeah: Yoko Ono’s Imagine Peace installation, especially the wish trees. As artist Sholem Kristalka pointed out in his preview in Xtra this week, the concept here could be called a bit glib and ineffectual. But in person, it was really delightful. I think people were really inspired by the image—trees bearing wishes—as well as the wishes some people wrote. (The best one I saw was “Beatles Reunion”.)

Nah: Michel de Broin’s Waterfall. I love a lot of what pedal-car maker Michel de Broin does, but this came off as a little less spectacular than I had hoped. Maybe that was the point, and all, but adding water to a building like this made me think “garden accessory.”

Yeah: Attendees really engaging and looking for meaning in the art. Being someone who works in the industry as an art writer, I tend to get cynical or glib in my own interpretations of work from time to time. But I was really impressed to overhear conversations of people really trying to explore the artwork with their friends. For example at Barr Gilmore’s shrunken Honest Ed’s sign in Court House Square, the young folks were talking psychogeography “You think, shouldn’t I be at Bathurst and Bloor?” to more morbid realms: “Ed Mirvish is dead… is honesty too?” Not everyone agrees with these approaches to art, but it was so great to hear people dig into things that way—er, that way being with enthusiasm and lack of guile.

Nah: The lack of signage from the Exhibition Place streetcar stop to the Zone C info booth. We got off the streetcar with a horde of folks eager to do “Zone C, yo”. But as soon as they emerged from the streetcar doors they promptly walked south into the exhibition grounds rather than continuing west to the railroad underpass and up into Liberty Village. I’m sure they figured it out eventually, but some signage might have helped.

Yeah: 15 Seconds of Fame at Yonge-Dundas Square by Daniel Olson. Definitely got the crowd looking at each other, even if it produced many cheesy responses in the spotlight.

Nah: Seeing a homeless man stuck trying to get some sleep as crowds trooped by his alleyway alcove-cum-installation-art zone near Victoria and Shuter. Again, love Quebec trio BGL’s work in drop-ceiling installations; didn’t love the disregard the event showed here to the homeless.

Yeah: Guns n’ Roses soundtrack tunes for Jon Sasaki’s I Promise It Will Always Be This Way at Lamport Stadium

Nah: The Earth and Sky banner hung indoors near York and Station streets–I got the idea from its past installation shots that it was to be strung between buildings, and higher up. Bummer, especially because the related show at Feheley Fine Arts in Yorkville is interesting.

Yeah: Rita McKeough’s mini-oil pumps near Esplanade and Yonge; reminded me so much of Alberta, of the landscape that makes cities across the country hum. Overlapping these landscapes really worked for me in an interesting way.

Nah: The amount of walking in uninteresting areas you had to do to get between venues at times. It seems that because of that my experience lacked the intensity of my initial Nuit Blanche (though, I must admit, it lacked a bit of the claustrophobic crowding as well.)

Paris DJs Podcast

Loik - Norman Is The One!

Loik - Norman Is The One!
(MP3 Podcast on www.parisdjs.com) Kraked, 2008-10-05

A tribute to Norman Whitfield :
In the past, you might have stumbled upon on of our summer mixes, cooked by one of our DJs, called... Norfield Whitman. As most of us here in the Paris DJs crew, he's just another NORMAN WHITFIELD passionate. As a frequent reader of this blog, you probably already know about the man. Norman Whitfield is a giant in our books, a legend of Psychedelic Soul, one of the most talented songwriters, producers and arrangers of all time. Nuff' said. R.I.P. Norman, you're the one!
>> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Whitfield

Tracklisting :
01. The Temptations - Hum Along and Dance
(from 'Psychedelic Shack' album, 1970 / Motown)
02. The Undisputed Truth - You Make Your Own Heaven and Hell Right Here on Earth
(from 'Face To Face With The Truth' album, 1972 / Gordy)
03. Yvonne Fair - Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On
(from'The Bitch Is Black' album, 1975 / Motown)
04. Gladys Knight and The Pips - Friendship Train
(from 'Anthology' compilation, 1973 Motown)
05. The Undisputed Truth - UFO'S
(from 'Cosmic Truth' album, 1975 / Gordy)
06. Rose Royce - Do It, Do It
(from 'Rose Royce Strikes Again' album, 1978 / Whitfield Records)
07. The Temptations - Let Your Hair Down
(from '1990' album, 1973 / Motown)
08. Yvonne Fair - It Should Have Been Me
(from'The Bitch Is Black' album, 1975 / Motown)

The original record covers are available on www.parisdjs.com

Credits :
Layout artwork by Djouls (djouls.com)
Photo borrowed from inside artwork of The Temptations 'Solid Rock' gatefold sleeve LP
Selected and mixed and mastered by Loik (kraked.com)

WFMU's recent playlists from Gateway to Joy with Donna

WFMU Playlist: Gateway to Joy with Donna from Oct 5, 2008

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Campus Perspectives: Centennial College’s Progress Campus

Centennial College was the first of 22 colleges opened under then-Education Minister (and later Premier) Bill Davis’s plan to establish an alternate post-secondary educational option to university in Ontario. Opened in 1966, Centennial was housed in an old munitions factory on Warden Avenue, with 500 students and 14 programs. Although the original Warden Avenue campus closed in 2004, Centennial now has four campuses in Toronto’s east end (in Scarborough and East York), with 30,000 students in 100 full-time or 200 part-time programs. The largest location is the Progress Campus, on Progress Road near Markham Road and Highway 401. The other locations are at Ellesmere Road and Morningside Avenue (the Science and Technology Centre), Warden and Eglinton avenues (The Ashtonbee Campus), and Pape and Mortimer avenues (the Centre for Creative Communications).

Visiting the Progress Campus, I really started noticing a common but powerful thread among many of Toronto’s schools: they are located next to major highways (Humber’s North Campus is off the 427, Seneca’s Newnham Campus is just east of the DVP, and York’s Keele Street Campus is south of the 407 and East of the 400). Running behind Centennial, the 401 leaves an indelible impression of what it must mean to be a student here. The Progress Campus is home to approximately half of Centennial’s full-time student population. It is also the site of the school’s only residence, a converted Howard Johnson (that is also used as a convention centre) that has room for 380 students (about five percent of the full-time students who attend the Progress Campus). I suppose the best and most convenient way to access the campus is by car, an assumption supported by the sprawl of parking lots that sit between the school’s main buildings, and the 401’s grass embankments. When I was going there I drove with a friend; it seemed like the easiest way to get there from where we were and where we needed to go afterward. This convenience factor seems fitting on the campus. It isn’t pretty, but I really question if it was ever meant to be — maybe it was simply meant to be efficient, to collect people as easily as possible (mainly with cars), give them the skills they need, then disseminate them into the work force.

A Shout Out to My Pepys

POST PUNK PIE

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-5-2008

October 04, 2008

Derek Powazek

Meaning-Making Machines

Grandma Powazek once told me why she stopped making cucumber salad. She’d been chopping cucumbers when her hands started to hurt. She thought the cucumbers caused the pain.

It’s logical, of course. Her hands hurt when she was chopping, and felt better when they weren’t. It’s also completely wrong. Her hands hurt because she was developing arthritis. But no amount of lecturing from my dad could change her mind.

In Yiddish this is called bubbe maisse - it literally means “mother stories” - but we all do it.

Our brains take a ton of input and turn it into narrative stories to help us understand the world. Imagine your brain sitting in a movie theater, watching the flashing screen. It takes those separate images and creates a story around them, just like you’re taking these individual words and turning them into something more than a string of definitions.

What’s interesting is that if you take away some of that input, our brains work twice as hard to fill in the gaps. In one of my favorite Radiolab episodes, they talk to fighter pilots who have experienced out of body experiences and found that, when the brain is deprived of input, it can create elaborate virtual realities on its own.

This is relevant online because we have much less input than in real-life social situations. Virtual communications like email, blog comments, and instant messages come without the associated social data our brains are used to. In the absence of context, our brains fill in the rest. What we fill it in with is a byproduct of our own insecurities. (I’ve written about this before as The Big Mirror.)

Recently a researcher named Jennifer Whitson published a study in the journal Science called “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception.” She did an experiment with two groups that were given a test. The “powerless” group was told that their answers were half right, half wrong, no matter what they said. The “in control” group were told that their answers were right.

Both groups were then shown a series of images of random static. Here’s the interesting part: The people in the “powerless” group were more likely to see images in the static - to find meaning in chaos - than the people in the “in control” group. So, while all our brains are meaning-making machines, the results of this study show that stressed out brains work harder to find meaning. They literally see things that are not there.

I think this is fascinating because it begins to explain the old question: Why do normal people become jerks online? Sure, people are more likely to act out when they think they’re not being watched, and the screen contributes to that. But why is that so? Maybe it’s because their brains are working harder to create meaning in the online chaos, and the meaning their stressed-out brains see is one where they’re justified in lashing out. After all, every child’s first excuse for a fight is to insist the other kid started it.

All of this is just biology. You can’t tell a person that what they’re seeing or feeling is not real and expect them to believe you. So what to do? The NPR story on the study contained this juicy bit at the end:

In addition to being a great tip for individuals, this is something community designers should think about. How can the interfaces we create to collect community participation give the user an “in control” feeling? If they did, I believe the user’s participation would be more positive.

This also puts some science behind what we did instinctually in Fray. When you tell a personal story and ask the user to reply with the same, it’s one of those “in control” experiences - just like the experiment that asked people to talk about their personal values. I’ve always believed that storytelling is empowering, because when you tell a story, you become its owner (instead of the other way around).

Everything we experience in life is a story we tell ourselves. As a creator of, or participant in, online community, remember that you’re much more in control of your story than it sometimes seems.

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Saturday’s headlines

Campus Perspectives: York University’s Keele Street Campus

When I got off the bus at York University’s Keele Street Campus I found it difficult to find my bearings. I got off at The Pond Road, next to an expanse of parking lots beyond which lies fields and suburban homes. Across the street there was a series of large contemporary buildings and a faded campus map. There was almost no one around, and very little to pull me in or give me a taste of the school’s character.

When York’s Keele Street campus was planned in the early 1960s, the place was meant to embody the character of historical educational institutions – secluded quadrangles and contemplative green space – but on a much larger scale, while at the same time incorporating contemporary architecture and other modes of modern living. The land the campus was built on was formerly used for agriculture, and therefore already had a pastoral quality. The architectural style that was adopted was concrete brutalism (similar to but much larger than University of Toronto Scarborough’s concrete buildings by John Andrews). To accommodate the modern ubiquity of cars, the campus was implemented with a road that ran around the school’s outer perimeter, linking to surface parking within. Cars were not meant to penetrate the campus much further than that (there were no real through-streets), the idea being that once people arrived by car and parked, they could walk into and enjoy the open green spaces at the campus’s core.

Standing on The Pond Road, the southern part of the still-existing perimeter road, I could see the influences of modernity, but not of traditional university campus planning. Eighty-five percent of York’s students commute to campus, arriving by 1,500 buses (including GO, TTC, and Viva buses) and over 30,000 cars each day. This strictly modern model of education, the commuter school, seems to have completely outweighed the notion of a traditional university. The campus’s architecture doesn’t look as though it is meant to be, or even can be, enjoyed for longer than a few hours at a time before people leave as fast as possible. Although the initial aims of the 1960s campus were eventually altered in the late ’80s and early ’90s in favour of a more dense urban-style campus, my initial impression was that traditional ideas of cohesion, fluidity, and beauty were similarly abandoned.

Walking further into the campus I started to see a pattern of traditional, albeit large, courtyards, but I felt the weight of the campus’s oversized buildings bearing down on me. York’s scale is enormous, and as the third largest university in Canada — with 7,000 faculty members and approximately 50,000 students — this doesn’t seem terribly surprising. However, this seems off compared to the University of Toronto’s St. George Campus, which accommodates a higher number of students (80% of which, similar to York, live off campus or commute) in more human-scaled buildings and within a smaller site (York is more than double St. George’s 168 acres). I couldn’t understand why the buildings at York just felt so…big.

A Shout Out to My Pepys

Top Mullah Issues Mickey Mouse Clarification

Unintentional sketch comedy results from extremely detailed correction of Mickey Mouse theological communication errors. Rodent issues fully explained.

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-4-2008

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Nuit Blanche: Behind the scenes with Blinkenlights

I had occasion to be up in one of the City Hall towers today and got a behind the scenes peek of Blinkenlights’ Nuit Blanche installation “Stereoscope” that will turn both towers into a giant interactive electric canvass until October 12th. You can read all about the project on their website, but here’s the jist:

In each window a thin white screen has been hung that will catch the light from the lamps installed throughout the towers. Each lamp has a wireless device on it, allowing it to be individually controlled. The public can participate in a few ways, including:

Note to iPhone owners: you can get the Blinkenlights application from the iTunes store.

October 03, 2008

A Shout Out to My Pepys

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-3-2008

garfield minus garfield

Photo

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Events Guide: Nuit Blanche preview

Toronto is staying up late tomorrow night for the third annual Nuit Blanche. With so many exhibitions in all the galleries and museums around the city, we thought we would take a look at some of the exciting things happening outdoors, in the parks and streets of Toronto.

Musicians, poets and visual artists will be taking over the church and its surrounding area. What seems most interesting about this exhibit is that the church itself will become part of the performance as the art intermingles with the architecture and projected throughout the entire space.

The outside of College Park will be recreated into an apocalyptic scene as participants become the walking dead for the night, turning the area into something reminiscent of a low-budget horror film set. Makeup tents are available on location, so anyone can join in on the corpsifying fun, but participants are encouraged to do their own makeup and come “in character” — as a baseball player or punk zombie, for example. Instructional video can be found here.

WHAT: Nuit Blanche Cabbagetown
WHERE: Along Parliament Street, and in Wellesley Park and Riverdale Park (map)

An entire neighborhood will become immersed in Nuit Blanche with artists and writers performing throughout the streets. The Cabbagetown group exhibit seems like one of the most interesting places to go tomorrow night since it will be a festival on its own. Performers in the parks, Shakespeare on Parliament Street, film projections along the buildings, and liquor store parking lot readings will all be taking place among the streets, trees, and fixtures of Cabbagetown, all of which will be decorated and turned into works of art on their own.

The natural, outdoor spaces of Trinity-Bellwoods will be taken over by over a thousand battery-powered red lights in an exhibition that looks to create an ethereal version of the green space. The atmosphere created by the shifting lights and all the spectators should make for an interesting new way to perceive the familiar park.

Damned Colonial

Ottawa/Edmonton for Canadian Thanksgiving

For those who are stalking me and want to know my movements, I will be in Ottawa for Canadian Thanksgiving, arriving the evening of Friday 10th Oct and leaving on the Monday 13th. Back to SF via Edmonton where I'll be staying one night with my sister and her family.

Death ray, fiddlesticks!

Angry Jew is angry

OK, I didn't want to say anything about any of them. I wanted to hide under the bed like a cat in a thunderstorm until this whole thing was over. But McCain said it last week and Palin said it last night, that we have to protect Israel from Iran or there will be a "second Holocaust."

Excuse me? Besides Jew-hating, what is the similarity? The Holocaust took place in a different part of the world and involved millions of people in concentration camps, many of them citizens of the nation that put them there, not nuclear weapons aimed at another country. You don't get to invoke the Holocaust just because Jews are involved. In fact, especially not when Jews are involved, because I don't know if you've heard, but we're kind of sensitive about it.

But hey, while we're ringing the Holocaust bell, I get to mention that I have an uncle who was in Auschwitz. He told us not to vote for Obama because a black man can't get elected. He wanted us to support Giuliani because he would be strong on terrorism. We said Yaacov, you're nuts, Giuliani is a lisping megalomaniac and we wouldn't vote for him to head the Flatbush Historic Homes walking tour. What relevance does this have to anything? Absolutely none! But since we're making noises with our mouths about the Holocaust, I thought I'd throw it in.

Torgo χ

Check And Send

Thunderbird users! use this! Hooboy it's a simple idea, but it does a world of good.

Spacing Toronto: understanding the urban landscape

Campus Perspectives: Seneca College’s Newnham Campus

Seneca College is Canada’s largest college, with more than 100,000 students in over 250 full- or part-time programs. Seneca has grown considerably from its beginning in 1967 as a school of 2,000 students spread out over five locations. Seneca now has eight campuses located throughout the Greater Toronto Area, four of which are in the City of Toronto. These four, in the former municipality of North York, are: the Jane Campus (21 Beverly Hills Drive), the Newnham Campus (1750 Finch Avenue East), Seneca@York (70 The Pond Road), and the Yorkgate Campus (1 York Gate Boulevard).

Like Centennial College, Seneca’s Toronto Campuses have unique characteristics due to the different programs they offer. The Jane Campus houses the Centre for New Technologies, where students learn trades such as tool and die making, precision machining, and mould making. The Yorkgate Campus focuses more on upgrading skills and teaching office systems. Seneca@York is the home of several of Seneca’s major schools, including the Animation Arts Centre, Communication Arts, as well as Biological Science and Applied Chemistry, among others.

The Newnham Campus is the main campus (and one of the largest in Canada), acting as the school’s academic and administrative centre. The campus is located next to the northwest off-ramp of the Don Valley Parkway, at Finch Avenue East. At the crossing point of several major methods of transportation, Newnham’s very accessible location is no doubt one the campus’s major draws. The school is a relatively short bus ride from the Finch subway station (with buses running frequently), or an even shorter ride from the Old Cummer Go Station. Plus, the school is on a Viva Bus Route, and because of its proximity to the DVP, people commuting by car can easily access the school. In addition, the Newnham Campus has a large residence building (which doubles as a conference centre) to balance its commuter population with students living on campus. (more…)

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