Margin Notes: Displays, Subway Trees, H0H 0H0

The Toronto Railway Historical Association's former Canadian National GP7 displayed red and green lights for the holidays on 28-November-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Between the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train and the CBC Sounds of the Season, I am finally starting to feel like it is the holiday season. Holiday decorations are spreading; the CN Tower is displaying only red and green in its top-of-the-hour light shows at night, and the Alex Ling fountain is covered with a tree in my neighbourhood. Even the Toronto Railway Historical Association got into the act, mounting red and green lights on a locomotive displayed outside the roundhouse. Unfortunately, the scene shown above lasted only a few minutes, as some of the solar-charged lights rapidly quit shining.

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Canadian Christmases are apparently rather austere, if the store windows like this one at The Bay in downtown Toronto, Ontario were any indication on 5-December-2009

The recession seems to be the excuse for a lot of repeat holiday decorations at many retailers, so I have yet to find any store windows that really impressed me. Especially disappointing are the windows along Yonge Street at the Hudson's Bay Company (The Bay) downtown store, the location of some quite creative displays over the years. This year, while there are some rather different Christmas trees made from antler-shaped materials, these windows are mostly just mannequins wearing winter clothing that could pass for a February display. They even dropped the corner toy display with G-scale trains that had been a regular scene for several years. If you come to downtown to see window displays, don't count on being impressed at The Bay this year.

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Some people hop on the subway in Toronto not to visit store windows, but to get a Christmas tree. Despite living in cities with many transit-dependent residents for more than a decade, it was not until this year that I noticed people carrying trees on the subway. There seems to be an unwritten rule on the TTC that the trees are treated like bicycles, and only allowed during off-peak hours. In addition, I saw someone wheeling a tree home using a small grocery cart down Dundas Street West last week. Not having a car is no excuse not to have a tree here.

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There's no excuse not to write Santa Claus here, either, as Canada Post will deliver letters to the North Pole. For some reason, I had not noticed the postal code that Canada Post uses for the North Pole until this year--H0H 0H0. If I understand the Canadian system correctly, this means that the North Pole's ho-ho-ho code places it somewhere in the outskirts of Montreal, Quebec--not exactly where I thought the North Pole was located!

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At least there's been snow on the ground around Montreal this year. Toronto did not receive snow the entire month of November for the first time since records started being kept at the airport in 1937. I'm not complaining--especially since all the long-term forecasts still call for a very snowy winter and winter doesn't officially start for two more weeks.

Radio Pick: Inside Bin Laden's Family

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's radio pick comes from the BBC. One aspect of the terrorism story that has been under-reported is that of the family members of terrorists. The BBC interviewed Jean Sasson, an author who has written the stories of Osama Bin Laden's first wife, Najwa, and his fourth son, Omar. The 12-minute piece on the World Service program Outlook offers insight both into the character traits of these three Bin Ladens and how a terrorist interacts with a family in the context to Islamic society.

Listen to streaming media of Outlook "Inside Bin Laden's Family"

Culture: The Last Steam Whistle

TORONTO, ONTARIO - One of the benefits of spending time volunteering at the John Street Roundhouse in Toronto is that the building contains a brewery. Stalls one through fourteen of the thirty-two stall roundhouse contain the Steam Whistle Brewery. The brewery gives out free samples, so after a hard day of physical work it is possible to stop in at Steam Whistle and grab a half-pint of pilsner before heading home on the subway.

Last summer, while building the bulk of the miniature railway in Roundhouse Park around the building scheduled to open next year, the routine was especially refreshing. After a hot day of tamping railway ballast in the sun, a cold beer was very satisfying, especially since many at the brewery knew what we were working on and were quite supportive of the effort, which is expected to bring even more people to the park and thus to the front door of brewery.

In fact, unless one really dislikes beer or alcohol, it's hard to develop some degree of fondness for Steam Whistle. Besides being a local company, offering free samples, and occupying a historic roundhouse building, they are known for a fleet of eclectic historic vehicles that they actually use to deliver beer. Some of those vehicles are often found in the parking lot behind the roundhouse. As a whole section of their web site is labeled, they are fundamentally about whimsy and enjoying life.

Today, the volunteers of the Toronto Railway Historical Association laid the final significant stretch of outdoor track, on roadbed not prepared by the city's contractor until this week. The miniature railway is essentially complete; my job as a member of the track construction crew is done. Thus, after doing some leveling and ballasting on this final section of track, a lead to a storage building, it was time for one last Steam Whistle beer.

With temperatures right around freezing, it was a far cry from the summer. However, one last Steam Whistle sample was really the only way to end the last day of track laying.

Holiday: CBC Sounds of the Season 2009

CBC Metro Morning host Andy Barrie at left looked on as business reporter Michael Hlinka showed off his Santa tie during the Sounds of the Season broadcast on 4-December-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This year's Sounds of the Season fundraiser for the Daily Bread Food Bank took place at the CBC headquarters building in Toronto, Ontario today. Since last year I had gone to see the live broadcast of the afternoon drive program Here and Now, this year I decided to get up much earlier than usual in order to get to the Glenn Gould studio in time to watch the morning drive program Metro Morning.


News reporter Jill Dempsey, sports reporter Scott Regehr, and traffic reporter Jim Curran prepared to deliver summaries after the 6 am edition of World Report on 4-December-2009

As Metro Morning is the show that I have been waking up to each weekday for more than three years, one of the attractions of going to the taping was the chance to see the people behind all those familiar voices. In addition to host Andy Barrie and the regular set of reporters including Jill Dempsey, Scott Regehr, Jim Curran, and Mary Weins, other CBC personalities dropped by including new World Report anchor Peter Armstrong and former Toronto weekend reporter Colin Butler.


Andy Barrie chatted with singer Matt Dusk during a news report as director Sonia Arab looked on during the Sounds of the Season broadcast on 4-December-2009

The draw for many people to come to Sounds of the Season is the musical performances. The headliner to many for Metro Morning this year was "crooner" Matt Dusk. Personally, though, I was more impressed with the native duo Digging Roots and Argentinian-Scot singer Alejandra Ribera, who not only were impressive artists but also symbolized the modern Toronto that Metro Morning claims to be trying to reflect.


Digging Roots performed during the Sounds of the Season broadcast of Metro Morning in Toronto on 4-December-2009

The whole point of the day was to raise money for the Daily Bread Food Bank. Several times during the program, Executive Director Gail Nyberg came out and read the latest value of funds raised off her hand. As of the last update issued in the afternoon, the Sounds of the Season had raised $115,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank.


Daily Bread Food Bank Executive Director Gail Nyberg provided a fund-raising update during the CBC's Sounds of the Season on 4-December-2009

More photos from the Sounds of the Season will be presented in a future update to my photo site.

Politics: Fear and Climate Change

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Long-time readers of this blog know that I have a real problem with making decisions on the basis of fear, and zero patience for those that incite fear in the electorate as a political tactic. Some things, though, are fundamentally scary. Even those that don't believe in climate change likely would agree that if changes that scientists predict, like rising sea levels and more powerful hurricanes and other storms, were to actually occur that this would be a scary outcome.

Correct or not, the scientific consensus that the world is currently on a path to that kind of climate change has started to result in political action, and this has incited fear in industry. With the possible exception of petrochemical companies that are not diversified, I find this fear more than a little bizarre--it has been demonstrated time and again that "green" process changes, things like reducing energy use and recycling feed stocks--almost always lead to efficiencies that save companies money in the long run. Even for "carbon intense" industry, it seems to me that a move toward more climate-sensitive technologies represents a tremendous business opportunity for them to seize and make money.

Instead, though, many companies are resisting any change to the status quo, and fomenting bloggers and other defenders of the status quo that now have given us "ClimateGate" over some obscure e-mails at East Anglia University that taken out of context make it appear that scientists falsified climate data. Even the supposedly-liberal CBC aired an irresponsible commentary by Rex Murphy tonight. Murphy tried to claim that climate change is no longer settled science--never mind all the work that researchers all over the world have done that had nothing to do with East Anglia--and that climate change science and advocacy are irretrievably linked. While there were clearly problems at East Anglia, to make the claim that climate change scientists have been driven by financial and power considerations is pretty rich coming from an opposition that has the financial resources to overwhelm the entire academic sector and still hasn't been able to find more than a handful of researchers willing to agree with them. The argument borders on absurdity.

That's what happens, though, when people get scared. People need to get past their fear of the what-if's of climate change and take a hard look at the actual data are telling us and start looking for rational, effective, worldwide solutions that make economic sense. That's what is supposed to happen at the upcoming Copenhagen conference, and we can hope that it still will.

Culture: Canadian Politeness

TORONTO, ONTARIO - I have forgotten which comedian I first heard joke that Canadians apologize to their pieces of furniture when they run into them, as it's a fairly common gag. The only thing is--it's not really a joke. It's true. I have observed at least two Canadians apologize to a sofa or table after stumbling into them, and admit that this is what they had done.

Canadian politeness can be astounding at times, and it always makes me smile. One of my favorite such moments was observed from a TTC bus as I rode through what is regarded as one of Toronto's roughest neighbourhoods, near Jane and Finch. A rather mean-looking individual, someone I would suspect of gang membership even here, was walking down the sidewalk when a car pulled out of a strip mall parking lot and started toward the street. Rather than intimidating the vehicle or just staying out of its way, the man stopped and waved the car by, then kept walking after it cleared. The scene was just quintessentially Canadian.

My first special trip for railroad enthusiasts in Canada, last April out of Guelph, resulted in similar experiences. People offered each other window seats, apologized when they inadvertently got in others' pictures, and just generally seemed well-behaved. The contrast with some of the behavior seen at the Train Festival in Michigan in July could not have been greater, where one photographer ended up putting another in a headlock.

The streak of Canadian railfan politeness continued last night. Many of purist photographers were frustrated by the amount of people in their shots at the actual Canadian Pacific Holiday Train performance at West Toronto, and some of us ended up over at the Old Weston Road pedestrian crossing to try to get some obstructed shots as the train passed that location. Some arrived relatively late, and there wasn't time to coordinate a proper photo line. We did the best we could, but one guy shooting video couldn't take an especially wide shot because of people to his left, and I managed to get in someone's going-away shot because he had moved while the train was going by and I hadn't noticed that in the dark. When the train was out of sight, we all re-gathered at the crossing, and apologized to one another for making our shots more difficult than they needed to be and shared what was on our preview screens from the recent captures. A fight did not break out; in fact, friends were made.

The fact that we were following a Holiday Train designed to spread good cheer and had just watched an uplifting performance probably didn't hurt, but my experience indicates that the same thing would have happened if we had been following any train in Canada, any time of year. Canadian politeness is a powerful force, and it's a shame that it doesn't spread continent-wide.

Holiday: Canadian Pacific Holiday Train

The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train parked at Lambton Yard in Toronto, Ontario for a performance on 1-December-2009

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The annual visit of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train took place in the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto today. The train rolled in to the Lambton Yard site exactly on time for a half-hour performance at 18:30, with a noticeably larger crowd than last year, which was the first year at the present location.


The stage door opened on the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train to start the performance on 1-December-2009

The Canadian Pacific folks know how to put on a good show. The stage for show is the side of a boxcar, and it dramatically opens with a plume of smoke. Santa Claus emerges to start singing the opening act. After the dignitaries speak, in this case local councilperson Bill Saundercook and representatives of the Daily Bread Food Bank and "Trick or Eat" campaigns, the rest of the musical performances begin.


"The Odds" performed during the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train stop in Toronto, Ontario on 1-December-2009

The headline act this year was "The Odds," a band usually described as an "alternative" group with roots dating back to the 1970's. While their style is fun and engaging--quite similar to BNL--I have always found it odd that rock-based groups have taken an increasing role in the Holiday Train performances, which are fundamentally family events. Rock is truly mainstream.


One of the boxcars with new decorations was noted on the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train at its stop in Toronto, Ontario on 1-December-2009

Always an impressive sight, the Holiday Train had mostly new decorations this year, a style described as "whimsical" by some and "child-like" by others. It certainly was an impressive sight as it pulled in for the event, a fundraiser for the Daily Bread food bank in Toronto. Each of the Holiday Train's stops supports local food banks; over the past decade, the train has led to the donation of more than two million pounds of food and $4 million to local groups.


The Canadian Pacific Holiday Train pulled out of West Toronto, Ontario on 1-December-2009

The performance could only be a half-hour as the train needed to continue to its next stop at Vaughn, Ontario. The Holiday Train has several dozen more stops as it continues its journey west to Port Moody, British Columbia. For a schedule, see the Holiday Train web site.