Margin Notes: Halloween, Snow, Hawk, KPFA

The Toronto Railway Heritage Centre's miniature train paused in Roundhouse Park amongst gravestones and ghosts in the "graveyard" on 31-October-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - With no trick-or-treaters passing by after dark, the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre's run on Halloween night turned instead into a ghostly night photo session on the miniature railway. The train was posed at various decorated locations in the park, mostly notably a "graveyard" scene with headstones, ghosts, and artificial fog. More coverage of this event will be forthcoming in a future post.

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One of the first snow showers of the season brought snowflakes to the Halloween scene at Don Station in Toronto, Ontario on 31-October-2010

While the evening was cold and mostly sunny, today didn't start that way. I walked out of my residence into a snow storm, and the snow showers didn't subside until the afternoon, including the one captured above with the holiday decorations at Don Station in Toronto's Roundhouse Park.

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What may have been a red-tailed hawk flew high above the Don River in Toronto, Ontario on 27-October-2010

Just four days before, temperatures had been approaching twenty degrees, and I was treated to some wildlife I don't often see in the city as I spent time along the East Don River, including various woodpeckers and a chipmunk. The clear highlight was what appeared to be a red-tailed hawk which circled above the river for nearly a half-hour that day.

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Some might accuse the executives of Pacifica radio in the United States of being worse than hawks. The Pacifica network owns five stations across the country, and on Thursday announced plans to replace a quarter of paid staff at KPFA in Berkeley, California with volunteers, resulting in an outcry. Picketing is planned for this coming Thursday. The workers' perspective is covered here. KPFA has a long history of such disputes, and this blog will be watching this one.

Margin Notes: Chill, Houses, Grover, KGO

Wilson Lau ran the steam locomotive at the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre on 24-October-2010, with the chilly air resulting in a nice plume of steam

TORONTO, ONTARIO - There has yet to be a low temperature below freezing this season in metropolitan Toronto, but temperatures have been creeping down, enough so that steam locomotives are much more spectacular. Locomotive #3 put off nice plumes of steam in the chilly weather all day today--and probably will again in its final weekend of operations for the season next Sunday, including the evening runs for Halloween--see TRHA web page for details as they become available.

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It's not cool temperatures but flooding that is the concern in New Orleans. A new floating house has been developed that normally sits at ground level but will rise to float if flooding occurs, as has been widely reported. Why weren't these brought to North America long ago?

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Perhaps everyone has been too busy watching Sesame Street's parody of the recent Old Spice commercials, "Smell Like A Monster." For those that have missed Grover imitating Isaiah Mustafa, check it out on YouTube, or check out this amusing re-mix.

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That skit will apparently not be a permanent fixture on Sesame Street, but KGO radio has made an interesting change in the San Francisco Bay Area. For some years, KUOW Seattle has made a practice of saying that various features would be coming up in "X minutes." As I heard while visiting the area, KGO hosts including Ronn Owens and Gil Gross have started saying that a topic will be coming back in, say, "3 minutes" before a commercial break, or "6 minutes" after the news. It sounds very weird on a commercial radio station.

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As a final note from my trip west, I should credit Virgin America airlines for actually delivering an orange juice shortly after I ordered it on the return trip, unlike on the initial trip. Apparently, the ordering system works after all.

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Finally, those into airline call signs may find it amusing to learn that Virgin America, a Burlingame, California-based airline, uses the call sign "Redwood." If you initially missed the double entendre, then you should be congratulated for having a clean mind.

Culture: Webbing Between Toes

BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON - I often say that the Pacific Northwest is the nicest place in the world--on the 50 days of year that the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges are visible. The problem is the other 300 days or so, when it's raining or thinking about raining. I may not be quantitatively accurate, but if you've ever lived in the Pacific Northwest, you understand the sentiment. When I was in the Seattle area in late 2005 and early 2006, I lived through 40 straight days of precipitation. Anywhere else, it would have been considered Biblical. Here, it was just a little longer streak than normal--and mild in many ways, since at least it wasn't snowing.

For native Pacific Northwesterners, plain gray and rainy weather in the winter doesn't get much attention unless it's a record streak or big storm; it's to be expected. When it doesn't go away in the spring or even in the summer, then it becomes tiresome. Most television meteorologists here joke that summer doesn't start until July 12th. The audience doesn't laugh; it plans a trip to Hawaii as soon as school is out.

In this context, 2010 has been even worse than normal. Down south in Portland, Oregon, it has been the wettest June in history, and not by a trivial margin. On June 16th, the total precipitation in Portland had reached 4.24 inches since the beginning of the month. The previous wettest June in Portland took place in 1984, when 4.06 inches fell the entire month. One meteorologist described it as "truly amazing." Most people I talked to in Portland last Sunday called it truly depressing. In fact, everyone I interacted with spoke about lack of motivation to do anything--and the record-setting month wasn't over yet. It rained during my visit.

Meanwhile, Seattle finally ended another streak. Today, after 272 days of cooler temperatures, the mercury finally reached 75 degrees Fahrenheit here (that's 24 C). That's a long time to wait for a hot day, even in Seattle. The previous record had been 254 days, set in 1999 and 2000. Suddenly, people here were in a very good mood. No statistics are available, but the very Seattle phenomenon of calling in sick on the first sunny day was taking place in full force.

I guess summer came before July 12th after all--but not before the Pacific Northwest gave its residents another spring of growing webbing between their toes. (The Ducks aren't the mascot of the University of Oregon for nothing.) After all, as the common joke goes, in the Pacific Northwest, we don't tan, we rust.

Margin Notes: No Tracks, CN, Chrome

Tracks were conspicuously missing from Roncesvalles Avenue in front of the streetcar mural in Toronto, Ontario on 4-March-2010 as construction on the road continued in other blocks

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Some deceiving spring weather has allowed exploration by foot which is not normally tenable in early March here. Among the sights I have encountered was the above scene on Roncesvalles without streetcar tracks in front of the well-known streetcar mural. Construction was ongoing a few blocks in either direction, but right there (and for that matter, in front of the famous Solarski Pharmacy) it looked like streetcars were just a thing of the past. Rest assured, they'll be back next year.

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If Canadian National (CN) keeps running its business as it has, it may want to start removing all its tracks. According to a parliamentary study as reported in the Financial Post, a mere 13% of customers report a high level of satisfaction with CN's service. This reinforces that the 61% on-time delivery rate mentioned earlier on this blog is not acceptable. However, CN's main competitor, Canadian Pacific, is not exactly a model, either, with just 25% of customers reporting a high level of satisfaction.

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The British press sure didn't think people had a high level of satisfaction with those games recently concluded in Vancouver, British Columbia whose name began with "O". I find it a bit odd that they decided to name the games after me, though--the "Glitch Games." I wasn't trying to be associated with them, really.

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I try not to be associated with the fawning praise that the technology press tends to bestow on products from Google, and what I have to say today may help. As most readers of this blog know, I am far from an early adopter of new technology, but after I start hearing early adopters raving about things, I tend to try them. So, I downloaded the Google Chrome browser this week to see how it compared with Mozilla Firefox, which I tend to use the most, and Apple Safari, which I use on occasion. While I will admit that on some java-based media sites it did appear to be somewhat faster, it wasn't a huge difference and my Internet connection seems to be the limiting factor so that all three of the browsers seem to be about the same speed on most activities. So, the fact that Chrome has so many fewer features than Firefox or Safari, including security customizations that I sometimes use, means that I am putting it aside and sticking with the browsers I know.

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Google Chrome may be faster at certain things, but being faster may no longer be culturally preferable. There seems to be a growing movement for pacing oneself, for slowing down. Hence, there is actually a drink for sale in Canada called Slow Cow which touts itself as a relaxation beverage. So, now we have a full spectrum of drinks, from Slow Cow to Red Bull.

Margin Notes: Snow, Roundabouts, Media

The Ed Hendler ("Cable") Bridge between Kennewick and Pasco, Washington was observed as snow started to fall again on 31-December-2009

KENNEWICK, WASHINGTON - It may be winter, but I'm running into more snow than I really expected in my travels. Snow is not uncommon in the Tri-Cities, but I wasn't expecting to have to shovel the walk here three times in as many days. Rain has now washed the snow away (as would have been expected after the first snowfall), ending the winter wonderland but making everything a lot easier here, almost like a different world.

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When people say that eastern Washington state is a different world than western Washington, they are usually referring to the climate or the Perot-style politics of this side of the mountains. They could, however, be talking about transportation infrastructure. There are a lot more roundabouts in Kennewick than even in New England, and the biggest surprise to me was that two roundabouts have replaced a clover-leaf interchange at the junction between SR 240 and US 395, arguably the busiest location in Kennewick next to the Blue Bridge. Somehow, I have a hard time believing this is really an improvement, even at rush hour.

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Certainly not an improvement is the state of Tri-City Herald, the local paper here. Back in May, I blogged about the healthy state of the paper. By all accounts, it is still financially healthy and I have no complaints about the quality of its local coverage, but it's now a tiny paper. I've been here for two Sunday papers now, and I read both of them in less than twenty minutes, even taking time going through the employment ads. I guess that's better than no paper at all, but one almost has to buy a New York Times or go on-line to keep well-informed.

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Those who are well-informed probably pay little attention to my weekly pick of a quality radio program, but in compiling the year-end summary, I was surprised to find a four-way tie at four for number of picks in 2009 for CBC's The Sunday Edition, CBC's As It Happens, Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge, and CBC's Age of Persuasion. That's right, a specialty show on advertising that ran for less than half the year tied for first place. The Age of Persuasion is back for another season, and the first show, on the impact of HIV on advertising, may well be the first pick of 2010. Check it out at 11:30 local time on Monday in Canada if you can; the audio file is not yet on the web site.

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A year-end feature that won't appear this year is my ranking of new popular music from the year. 2009 marked the year in which a combination of being inundated with programming podcasts and a lack of budget for purchasing new music led to complete neglect of popular music for the year. No wonder the music industry is reeling--I just don't have time for them anymore, even when unemployed!

Travel: Going to California for Snow

A snow globe was unexpectedly surrounded by real snow in Diamond Springs, California--elevation just 1800 feet--on 8-December-2009

PLACERVILLE, CALIFORNIA - People in Toronto, Ontario were quite surprised not to see any snow the entire month of November, as this was the first time since the current weather stations opened more than 75 years ago that this had never happened. Furthermore, the trend continued in December--while there were flurries noted in the air as I left town yesterday, there still had been no accumulation on the ground in the entire first week of December.

Normally, one comes to the state of California to get away from snowy weather and head for sun and warmth. While locales like San Diego (or anywhere in the Southland) would be safer bets within the state for warm and dry conditions, my destination of El Dorado County in the Sierra foothills should have also been a safe bet. Placerville rarely sees any snow, period, and hadn't seen any real accumulation since 1972.

That changed this week. A storm started before dawn on Monday, dumping about seven inches of snow in the immediate vicinity of Placerville. This was the largest accumulation of snowfall in the area since 1923. Driving from Sacramento, I was surprised to find the snow level on US 50 at about El Dorado Hills at about 1000 feet in elevation, and conditions unsurprisingly became more wintry as I continued east and higher to Placerville at about elevation 2000 feet.

Today, I had a chance to walk around an area of Diamond Springs west of Placerville and found winter scenes that I had certainly seen before--in Ontario, Massachusetts, or the High Sierra in California, not the relative lowlands. Sacramento media reported on shelters for the displaced and homeless to avoid freezing and on power outages as if they were from Seattle, Washington or Minneapolis, Minnesota. It all sounded familiar--there's no brain surgery involved in the opening of a shelter or in reminding drivers how to drive in the snow--it just doesn't seem to belong here.

The peculiar local angle on the snow accumulation comes from the citrus growers at lower elevations. Mandarin orange farmers in Penryn, California have received a lot of attention as temperatures dipped to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold--close to freezing--is actually good for the species, causing a higher sugar content in the fruit, but actual freezing leads to the entire crop being lost. With one last night of freezing temperatures expected tonight, it will not be known if more than $2 million in crops have survived until tomorrow.

That's what I get for heading to California--the very weather I normally would have been experiencing, but haven't been, at home.

Margin Notes: Storms, Radio, Boxes, Art

A rising sun barely shone on the Humber River as seen from Dundas Street on 27-January-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Have I mentioned that it's still winter here? Oftentimes during this season, I will listen to Buffalo, New York radio stations and hear near-cataclysmic forecasts for snowstorms while only modest precipitation is predicted here in Toronto. Such was the case on Monday, when a storm was predicted to shut down Buffalo on Wednesday but not lead to much accumulation here. By Tuesday, the local forecast had changed to something closer to the Buffalo one, and sure enough, it snowed for most of the day on Wednesday. Officially, we only received 13.4 cm, but it looked like nearly double that in my neighborhood. Yes, it's winter.

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Helping us through the winter are comforting voices on the radio. For the past month, the normal host of the afternoon program Here and Now, Matt Galloway, has been filling in on CBC Radio One's Metro Morning show. As much as we hope that the current absence of regular, veteran host Andy Barrie is temporary, the month with Galloway in the chair offered a glimpse of the future. Barrie will retire someday and Galloway is young enough to be his successor. I will miss Barrie--just like I've been missing him since November as he attends to family matters--but if Galloway takes his place, I'll still feel informed and perhaps will start the day with even greater enthusiasm for this great city.

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When I wake up to a voice other than Barrie's or Galloway's, there's a certain emptiness in my morning. This week there's also been a certain emptiness in my e-mail "in" box. For the first time in recent memory in the past week, I've actually managed to clear out my computerized "in" box. For as long as I can remember, there's been a networking e-mail in there that I was waiting for a certain time to follow up on, or a friend that I was waiting to get back to after something happened, or some other long-term message sitting in there as a reminder. I had reason to act on all those old e-mails, and thus found myself with an empty box, and in fact it's empty as I type this right now. Of course, the "in" box on my physical desk is not empty, and has zero chance of being so until after tax season.

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I didn't want to wait until after tax season when I was given the opportunity to check out the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) for free, and I managed to do that in the past week. I will have more to write about my visit in the future, but suffice to say that it was a worthwhile visit. While I do not think the new Frank Gehry-designed building is worth the price of admission as some have proposed, what is inside the structure is certainly worthwhile, from rooms full of Cornelius Krieghoff paintings to a fleet of model ships to a temporary exhibit with two famous Paul Rubens paintings together to some very interesting modern art.

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One of the things I learned at the AGO was the meaning of "exquisite corpse". I first heard the term in relation to the very odd NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu. After his often very dark commentaries, it is mentioned that he is an editor of an on-line journal with that name, which I assumed was just as weird as his essays. Actually, the term has been used since the 1920's to refer to a piece of art in which different artists make different portions of a work in a pre-defined way without knowing what the other artists were doing. In other words, one artist could draw a person's head, another the torso, another the legs, and another the feet, and the resulting drawing would be an exquisite corpse. I feel a little better about the term now that I am no longer ignorant of its origins.

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Another thing I learned at the AGO was that Vancouver group N.E. Thing Company in the 1970's came up with the idea of ART as an acronym for "Aesthetically Rejected Thing" and ACT for "Aesthetically Claimed Thing." Needless to say, they were more interested in an ACT over ART. In the spirit of the N.E. Thing Company, one wonders if I will ever turn this blog from a BIT ("Blog of Irrelevant Things") to a BET ("Blog of Exciting Things").

Margin Notes: Cold, Missions, Delays

A duck sat on the ice covering the Humber River near Dundas Street in Toronto, Ontario on 9-January-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Yes, it's been quite cold around here. On Wednesday, the arctic air moved in, and highs didn't exceed -10 C and lows didn't exceed -18 C again until today; the wind chill was -30 C or below twice when I woke up this week. It's pretty bad when it's so cold outside that even in a properly-heated apartment moisturizer is required because the air is so dry. On Saturday, I talked to people that were driving one block to avoid having to walk outside--I'm sure people out in the prairies, where -20 C would have been an improvement on their high temperatures for much of the week, are laughing at us right now.

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No laughing matter was the power outage that affected 22,000 households in Toronto at the height of the cold weather late Thursday, with some customers out of power for a full day. A sprinkler malfunction at a Hydro One substation near Bloor and Dufferin is being blamed for the outage. Interestingly, in this week's Bloor West Villager newspaper, Hydro One ran an advertisement essentially apologizing for how long they had taken to restore power following the storm on 28-December-2008. "We regret the inconvenience the storm-related outages caused our customers. We thank them for their patience and resilience." I wonder what they will say next week?

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One thing I'm really looking forward to in the next week is the end of retrospectives on the George W. Bush presidency. The only thing I found amusing in any of the coverage this week was Republican strategist Ed Rollins making what may have been a Freudian slip in referring to the famous 2003 sign on an aircraft carrier, referring to it as the "Mission Impossible" sign instead of "Mission Accomplished." Clearly, that's what the sign should have said.

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An appropriate GO Transit car to see this week was the one with the Maple Leafs wrap ad, noted at Willowbrook Yard in Toronto on 17-January-2009

A moving sign caught my eye this week. While out watching trains in the cold, GO Transit commuter equipment passed in front of me including the car decorated with a wrap ad for the Toronto Maple Leafs. In a white environment with the next snow storm already approaching on the horizon, seeing a car advertising hockey seemed entirely appropriate.

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Commuter trains were about the only form of transportation I used on my winter vacation trip this year that operated on time, other than local city buses. Not one of my airline flights went off as scheduled, but clearly the worst was my return trip to Toronto. I've been relatively kind to US Airways in the past on this blog, but they've made my do-not-fly list now (along with United and Alaska). For my red-eye flight from Seattle to Philadelphia while Seattle was receiving yet another snow shower on 4-January-2009, we could not leave Seattle because US Airways didn't have de-icing equipment available. We had to wait until Southwest Airlines was done with their flights for the day, then their contractor's equipment was "borrowed" and literally sat next to our plane for about half an hour before they found someone to operate it and de-ice our wings. The flight finally took off nearly three hours late, and one of the few things the airline did right the whole experience is that they had a new boarding pass waiting for me upon arrival since I had missed my connecting flight. The only problem is that the flight was soon canceled, and no further flights were available until the next day. The only thing I could get a phone agent to do was book me on a United itinerary via Washington DC--the only airline actually worse than US Airways that could have been accessed. Amazingly, those flights actually got me to Toronto close to their schedules, but my checked luggage that I had paid an extra $15 for did not arrive for another two days because United failed to transfer it in Washington DC. What really amazed me is that the only airline employee that smiled at me the entire trip was one flight attendant on the Washington-Toronto flight. That's it. Both US Airways and United need some serious help, and Air Canada needs to join a different alliance.

Travel: Seattle's Snowmageddon

A pile of snow rose in a parking lot near Bellevue Way and NE 8th Street in Bellevue, Washington on 23-December-2008--a common sight in New England or Canada, but not near Seattle

BELLEVUE, WASHINGTON - By leaving Toronto for the holidays, people in Ontario have been saying that I escaped "Snowmageddon," the nickname given to a series of three storms that struck Toronto starting last Wednesday with 8-20 cm of snow apiece. While that constitutes an unusual occurrence, Toronto can handle any given snowfall of 20 cm and by all accounts the city is as functional as would be expected in the winter now that "Snowmageddon" has passed.

I certainly did not escape. The word has not been used in the local media here, but the Pacific Northwest has been facing something that feels far closer to "Snowmageddon" than anything that Toronto has faced. Seattle, of course, can have winters without any snow at all, though it is not uncommon for a significant snowfall to occur. When that happens, however, the temperatures almost inevitably rise above freezing, rain follows, and the snow is off the ground within days. Thus, the Seattle tradition developed of not preparing for a serious snowstorm and simply shutting down the city until the snow is gone.

This December has been different. Instead of the temperatures rising, they have remained below freezing for multiple storm-fronts. By the time of my delayed arrived at Sea-Tac airport on Monday, the snow banks from two storms had grown to about 30 cm, and the forecast is for yet a third significant snowfall in the time before Christmas, when the normal pattern may finally return with rain to wash the snow away.

Seattle is not used to being a winter wonderland, and the winter weather pattern more like that found in Anchorage has strained many systems here. Alaska Airlines (yes, that's Alaska Airlines) shut down operations at Sea-Tac on Sunday night because it had run out of de-icing fluid; a line of their 737's still sat parked near the north end of the airport when I landed on Monday. Amtrak didn't fare much better. Because the northwest normally does not face constant cold temperatures, the BNSF Railway that hosts most Amtrak trains does not employ switch heaters and the tracks froze in place. Trains stopped for the day on Sunday in the Cascade corridor while switches were thawed with propane torches. Similarly, Greyhound stopped all service from Seattle for several days, sending stranded passengers to homeless shelters.

On the roads, the city of Seattle claims environmental reasoning--disputed by most scientists--for not using salt on its roadways, instead trying to create a layer of packed snow for all-wheel drive vehicles and front-wheel drive vehicles with chains. Predictably, this just leads to slippery conditions for everyone, and shoppers have been avoiding Seattle in droves, favoring suburbs that actually take the time to clear their roads and apply something other than sand. Scientists claim that sand, which causes unnatural silt build-up, is actually a larger environmental concern than salt, which is dissolved by the melting snow to concentrations close to that found in natural sea water. Furthermore, the city of Bellevue points out that the use of potassium chloride instead of sodium chloride causes a lower corrosive impact on vehicles. These are all old hat issues in Ontario, but not normally a significant matter in Washington and Oregon.


A woman walked a pair of malamutes down 108th Ave SE in Bellevue, Washington on 23-December-2008

A few have been enjoying the snow. While out walking today, my family encountered a pair of malamutes being walked down the street. For these Alaskan dogs in Washington state, this is the closest they will ever come to running the Iditarod.