OK, what’s for dinner? There was some leftover takeout veggie biryani in the fridge and some garlic naan too. I heated up the biryani in a skillet, then fried up two eggs sunny side up in the same pan, warmed up the naan directly on one of the gas burners and served up with a cold beer, it’s leftover magic at the Comfort Food Diner.
I stumbled across this gem and thought I’d share it. It’s Mac Beattie and his Ottawa Valley Melodiers performing Snowmobiles.
In his column yesterday in The Toronto Star, Ed Keenan wrote about the massive tax increase assessed against the arts building at 401 Richmond. Full disclosure: I’m represented for my paintings by an art dealer in that building – yumart – and my work has been featured there.
This building was bought for $150,000 back in 1994 when nobody wanted it amidst a decaying garment district.
The owner of the building has turned the space into among the most vital destination arts spaces in the City. That will never do, will it? In this country, not many people get rich making or selling art or operating other arts related ventures. I have personal experience with that – I held a day job for 30 years to support my art habit. You would not believe the number of people who continue to ask me what kind of job I’m looking for next – they simply don’t assign any value at all to an art-making activity.
Now the tax man wants to collect based on the potential value of 401 Richmond – if its value was maximized as for instance, a condo development. How interesting. We have a tendency to look at the sprawling and seemingly uncontrolled condo development on the west side downtown as driven by the development industry but this is a case in which the City is driving that kind of land use by its tax structure.
Keenan suggests in his column that the province should step in: “It is up to provincial policy-makers to fix this — and looking at what 401 Richmond has given to the city, and continues to give, it’s clear that it should, and soon”. That would be fantastic, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen. After all, the province is responsible for the Ontario Municipal Board who continue to make decisions supporting over-development at the expense of community character across the City.
When 401 Richmond is gone, people will lament its loss but it will be too little too late. Sometimes it seems that everything is broken.
On the subject of Everything is Broken, I heard on the news this morning that the Toronto Transit Commission are going to introduce undercover operatives to nab those ne’er-do-wells who ride transit without paying their fares. The current enforcement guys wear bright yellow outfits. I’ve been told when they show up on a street car people rush up to the machine to pay their fare.
The TTC has around 80 fare inspectors according to The Star + a mystery number of undercover officers to come. I don’t know the cost of enforcement but it must be over $3 million per year for that many people. There are also admin staff to consider. Meanwhile, the same news source has reported that too many Presto readers are failing.
If you have to spend that kind of money on enforcement (and yes fares continue to go up), there has to be a better system, and I hope the TTC is trying to come up with one. I suggested in a recent post that we take a close look at paying for transit through taxes rather than on a pay per use basis. If you are not expected to pay when you board a street car, there is no need to spend any money at all on fare enforcement.
I’ve been working on the St. Anne’s Reel on the banjo recently, but I’ve been familiar with this one from my button accordion days as Reel de Ste-Anne. I don’t know the actual origin of this one, but a lot of people will tell you it’s a Quebec tune, popularized in English Canada by the fabulous Don Messer and his Islanders. I know it’s also played a lot in New England and in the American Mid-west and is popular with Missouri fiddlers. I suppose what I’m getting at is there are many ways to play this tune.
Let’s start with a Quebec button accordion version….this is from Serge Carrier’s YouTube channel.
It’s hard to listen to Don Messer and his Islanders without falling head over heels in love with this band. Just watch Charlie Richards dance!! I remember as a young boy watching Don Messer’s Jubilee on television. This stuff is in our DNA. Weren’t they great?
And now a Missouri version…
One more….here’s a Metis version from the Pure Metis Band…
Two Long Branch residents, Mike Foderick & Kristle Calisto-Tavares, spear-headed the 2nd Annual Long Branch Holiday Food Drive this past weekend. They delivered paper bags across the community for folks to fill with food items – then they picked up the full bags from porches across the neighbourhood. The food is to be distributed by the Daily Bread Food Bank.
What a great community initiative!
Puppies have two speeds: full-tilt boogie and asleep. Little Ruby is a joyful pup. She adores George and constantly wants him to play. Sometimes in the back yard they chase each other around and have a ball. Other times he’ll grunt at her in an effort to go back to his nap.
Ruby watches George all the time and she’s learning a lot about being a dog around this place from him. On walks, she is happy to follow him around. If Big George is going there, Little Ruby wants to be there too.
At not quite 12 weeks, Ruby is getting the idea that she is to relieve herself outside. At first, she didn’t differentiate the deck from the rest of outside, but it was a start. Now she’s started doing her business on walks, which is met with loads of excitement from us humans. We are 2 full days accident-free, which I did not expect this quickly. I’m hopeful that will continue, although I recall that while George “got it” quickly, there were occasional accidents in the first couple months we had him.
We have a little shoe box sitting in a corner for Phyllis. None of the other cats care about it, but she likes to sleep in that box for hours. Not now, though. Ruby has the box and has designated it a toy, after having run around the house with it.
Ruby went to see Lorraine today, our super-fantastic groomer.
Pretty exciting. Even better though, was the post-grooming tug game with her new friend Pele, Lorraine’s Old English Sheepdog assistant.
The Twenty Seventh Street Book Box is full of free books
At this time of year, we’re bombarded with heavy-duty retail marketing. Sale, sale, sale. Buy now. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Holiday Sales, Boxing Day sales and on and on and on. Stop shopping for a few minutes and grab a free book at the Twenty Seventh Street Book Box. Pour yourself a cup of tea, find a comfie chair and do a little reading. It’s good for the soul.
Right now the book box is totally full and there are some very interesting titles. They aren’t all brand new. They might not have a “Heather’s Picks” decal on the front. Just good books. Right now there are books for adults as well as kids, and even a set of Betty Boop DVDs for the animation history buffs out there. For music freaks, there is even a scholarly work on the history of the polka.
There are no strings, just free books. If you want to add books, that’s great too. How you use it is entirely up to you. The book box works best when regular visitors share great titles back and forth. The Twenty Seventh Street Book box has been in place for a few years now. It isn’t one of the fancy “Little Free Libraries” you see here and there, with the glass window and peaked roof. We made it out of an old metal ammunition box, a little step ladder and a roasting pan for a hat. Sometimes the latch is a bit sticky. Just wiggle it and it will open. As I say it isn’t fancy, but people seem to like it and it continues to be viable in our community.
I’m very pleased to say that the book box has not been vandalized nor tagged (at least not yet), and it’s never gone empty. There is a constant turnover of books. I check it every two or three days and I do take responsibility for a little bit of management. I remove the real estate flyers and various evangelical pamphlets. This is about sharing books. There is a bulletin board on the door but it doesn’t get much use. I take out any books that are in really bad shape, and if we have a surplus I try to change them up from time to time.
The Twenty Seventh Street Book Box is located in front of our home at 15 Twenty Seventh Street. Drop by and check it out anytime and if you like any books you see, feel free to take them home and enjoy them.
The Paris Bear
The Paris Bear is our latest large-scale mosaic project. This grizzly bear mosaic, which we recently installed at a beautiful home in Paris Ontario, is about 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide. It’s made with a combination of materials including broken crockery and smalti (glass) tiles on a backing of pressure treated ply. It floats just a little bit off the wall using a French cleat.
You can see more pictures of this grizzly at our Long Branch Mosaics page. It is installed in a garden area, overlooking a pool. In spring, the garden will grow up around the feet of the bear. Like most of our mosaics, this is a custom project, and we’ve designed this one specifically for it’s current location.
The same property is also home to our Magnolia Bench.
We started doing mosaic work perhaps a decade ago. Sheila (AKA Tuffy P) started it as a project to do with some visiting youngsters. At some point we began making large mosaic birds, and later butterflies for our own garden. Along the way, a number of people who have seen this work at our home have asked us to make mosaics for them, so we started taking commissions. Each project is unique. You can see many of them at the mosaics site.
The Magnolia Bench project required a comfortable surface to sit on so we used high quality smalti glass tiles. This mosaic was prepared in sections and installed on-site using a special mortar and grout. For our birds, butterflies and bears (the Paris Bear is our second grizzly), we take a much more direct and highly improvisational approach, which does not require grouting. Sheila and I work on the mosaics together, so we came up with the name Long Branch Mosaics (the location of our home workshop).
27th Street 