Culture: The Humber Inuksuit

Those walking along the Humber River north of the Old Mill have been treated to this impromptu art display in the river, seen 6-August-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Sometimes the best public art is not commissioned, but is a spontaneous act of an individual or group who sees an opportunity to improve the appearance of something and just goes for it. Some consider this vandalism, but on rare occasions the result is so amazing that a clear consensus emerges that not only is it art, but it should be preserved in its own right.


These inuksuit in the middle of the Humber River seen on 6-August-2010 were the work of local resident Peter Riedel

Such is the case with a group of 39 rock sculptures (a reporter counted; I didn't) in the middle of the Humber River that suddenly appeared earlier this week, just a short walk from my residence. Some resemble native inuksuit, other resemble animals. At first, some people thought they had gone up overnight on Sunday night (as reported in the initial Toronto Star article), and there was all kinds of wild speculation about how many people it would take to erect them and even whether glue had been used. After it appeared in the newspaper, the actual story came out.


This sculpture resembled a seal in the middle of the Humber River north of the Old Mill on 6-August-2010

As reported in the Toronto Star, photographer Peter Riedel actually made the sculptures in about four hours on Sunday afternoon, and he had an audience. He's made rock sculptures before, using them as a chance to document them photographically before they naturally degrade from the elements.


The artist's favourite of this set of work--resembling the egrets common in this stretch of the Humber River--was observed on 6-August-2010

Yet, there seems to be a large number of people that don't want to see this set of sculptures disappear. Rather than being victims of vandals, these sculptures are substantially maintaining their form. When I visited today, five days after their construction, I could find only one that was clearly no longer in intended form. Nature will take its course, but it's not being helped along.

Peter Riedel has given us a fine example of the best of impromptu art.

Culture: Remembering the Goodwill Games

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Twenty years ago today, the Goodwill Games were coming to a close in Seattle, Washington. Living in the Seattle area at the time, I managed to attend only one night of track and field events during the game. Here was my summary in the "Vacationer's Notebook" feature from Tuesday, 24-July-1990:

The Goodwill Games are finally here! After years of planning by Turner Broadcasting and the Seattle Organizing Committee, competition finally began last Friday, though the opening ceremonies were not until Saturday. Some people think the games are the best thing to happen to Seattle since the World's Fair [in 1961] with the entire world looking at the Gateway to the Pacific. Others, like Art Thiel, think the games are scaring off tourists and will attract growth we don't need. I think Art needs to spend some time at the venues...

As a Seattle-area resident, I felt obligated to attend at least one Goodwill Games event. When my mother won tickets to track and field, I was set. Last night, my farther and I took a crowded Metro bus to Husky Stadium. We had excellent seats, just six rows away from the track near the finish line.

For a person used to watching athletic games on television, actually being there was extremely exciting. The biggest stars were just a few feet away, and just the athletes. Ted Turner and Jane Fonda walked by several times.

Of course, the real highlights were the athletes. Jackie Joyner-Kersee put on her usual show of excellence in the pentathlon events, even seeming to take it easy in the 800 meter race. Patty Sue Plummer ran an excellent women's 1500 meters, staying at the back of the pack until the last lap. Little Joe Falcon led the entire men's 3000 meters. Vicki Borshiem looked like a mannequin before high jumping, as the Soviet jumper Telesina dominated the competition but was unable to set any records.

Perhaps most amazing were the men's sprinters. In the 110 meter hurdles, Roger Kingdome was victorious in a photo finish. Carl Lewis--and his ponytail--were defeated in an amazingly quick 100 meters.

One truly cannot experience the Goodwill Games without being there.

A lot can change in twenty years. While the goal of bringing United States and Soviet athletes to each others' soils in the wake of Olympic boycotts was clearly successful, Ted Turner never made any money from the Goodwill Games. He would eventually sell the games to Time Warner Australia, who held a final event in 2001 and then canceled the series. That same year, Jane Fonda and Turner divorced. By 2006, Ted Turner would step down from Time Warner and largely leave the public eye.

Education: The Anne Rice in My Life

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The author Anne Rice has been in the news recently for publicly renouncing her Roman Catholic faith. She used her Facebook page to make the announcement. Some questioned why this was news at all--Rice had previously left the church when she was 18 and only re-avowed the faith ten years ago. Certainly, NPR News has received quite a bit of criticism for its eight-minute interview of Rice on All Things Considered, which aired Monday.

However, Anne Rice has never been an author to me. Anne Rice was the best Reading teacher I ever had, in the sixth grade at Odle Middle School in Bellevue, Washington. The middle school gifted program I was in had self-contained classes, most taught by two gifted specialists, Linda Oman and Anita Bhat. However, there were more classes for the three grade levels than they were contracted to teach and thus outside specialists were brought in for various courses, usually Science and Math, but in this case, Reading.

Mrs. Rice made an impression right from the first day of school. For students already reeling from the structure of middle school compared with free-form elementary school, entering her classroom was an additional shock. Her diction was absolutely perfect, and it would remain that way the entire year. She made it clear that she would not tolerate students being late or any distractions in the classroom. The fact that we would learn that Mrs. Rice was sensitive to sunlight just seemed entirely appropriate for a strict Reading teacher. Yet, rather than feeling threatened by the expectations, I think most of my class viewed it as a chance to prove we were mature enough to handle it.

Fundamentally, this group of gifted students rather liked Reading, so the fact that we had a teacher that was going to push us was actually rather nice. I don't remember most of what we read in that class, but I do remember being questioned about vocabulary and learning more about the origin of words than I had ever encountered before. Through it all, Mrs. Rice wasn't actually that stingy about giving positive reinforcement, but it did have to be earned, and when you heard a comment like "Very good!" you knew that she meant it.

I believe her class was the first time I ever tackled any Shakespeare, and I specifically remember reading "Romeo and Juliet" aloud. We would be assigned the various characters at the beginning of class, and mostly those assigned Romeo and Juliet would be working for their grades on a given day. One day, I was assigned Friar Laurence and managed to go through a fairly long passage (perhaps the beginning of Act II, Scene III), barely taking a breath. At the end of class, someone commented that they hadn't gotten a chance to get a good grade that day. Mrs. Rice just stated back, "I bet our Friar Laurence today thought the same thing at the beginning of class. Sometimes you have to take advantages of the opportunities you do have." Those of us listening learned an important life lesson that day.

While most of even my high school teachers are now retired or teaching elsewhere, I was amazed to find that Mrs. Rice is still at Odle as she has been since 1981, though she now mostly teaches Social Studies. She even has a web site which expresses her philosophy exactly as I remember it, that discipline creates a level of comfort that leads to everything else one should expect from an education.

I bet today's students are still getting that education in her classroom, and furthermore that Anne Rice is still making sure that they're paying attention to it.

Media: No Podcast, Forget It

TORONTO, ONTARIO - The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)'s radio division in the United States, which has gone by a variety of names in recent decades, has had a poor history with the Internet. When the reviled Mel Karmazin, now CEO of Sirius XM, was running CBS radio under the Infinity name, he stated that he would never put a CBS station in the Internet, and indeed none of the famous CBS news or music stations were available on-line.

After Karmazin moved on, all that changed. The big CBS news stations, from KCBS in San Francisco to WINS in New York, started live streams on the Internet, and so did their music stations. A few stations went all-out for podcasting, with WCBS in New York creating a variety of podcast streams, even including the CBS network's Dave Ross commentaries. Over time, a variety of CBS podcasts, from the weekly 60 Minutes and Face the Nation to the four-times-daily Osgood File, made it onto my podcast list.

The signs that trouble was coming started when The Osgood File began to feature advertising. It really didn't bother me that much, since the radio version has a minute and a half of advertising associated with it, and the podcast had only thirty (later forty-five) seconds. If that's what it takes for the podcast to continue, so be it. The information was still free, just like the radio broadcast, and it was easy to listen to at my convenience.

Then, in mid-July, the CBS-owned-and-operated news station in Boston, WBZ-AM, dropped the podcast of its Jon Keller commentaries when it revised its web site. There remained a Jon Keller blog on the web site, but the audio was no longer available as a podcast. One had to visit the web page and click on the link so that an advertisement would show in a special window as the commentary played. I e-mailed to complain and pointed out that Keller's commentary was worthwhile to me if it came as an automatically-downloaded podcast, but if I had to actively go to their web site and click around, I wasn't going to bother. Indeed, I don't know what Keller's cynical mind has contemplating since.

Today, I discovered that they've done the same thing with the network Dave Ross commentaries. The podcast is gone. The commentaries remain on the WCBS-AM web site, but one has to click on them to listen, and an ad comes first. I'm not going to bother--I might think about doing that when I'm home in the evening, but there's no way I'm going to do that while traveling and my time on the Internet is limited.

If CBS is going to stop podcasting, then I'm going to stop listening to CBS programming. There's too much quality programming out there that I can get more easily. The really annoying thing is that they already have a model for incorporating advertising--used for the Osgood File of incorporating the advertising into the podcast--that serves the same purpose of accommodating advertising. They don't need to eliminate their podcasts in order to get advertising revenue. They're making their content harder to access, and I won't be the only one that will ignore it as a result.

Some companies don't get it, and it appears that CBS is in that category again. I've spent my whole life enjoying CBS programming, but it looks like that era may be coming to an end because they're going backwards in their use of the Internet and eliminating podcasts.

Holiday: It Needs No Significance

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Most of the holidays on the North American calendar have a specific purpose. Whether religious or secular in nature, there's a clear reason why the holiday has been sanctioned by the government, and specific celebrations to attend that occur on that day, whether re-reading the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. or churches holding Midnight Mass. Cynics, though, often state that the original purpose of most holidays is ignored, businesses just use whatever it is as an excuse to hold a sale, people just want to stay home and relax, and many don't even realize the origins of a given holiday.

The epitome of that viewpoint comes in the form of the August Civic Holiday in certain provinces of Canada. Held the first Monday of August, it celebrates... well, some places it celebrates a locally-significant figure, and some places it celebrates nothing. It's just a nice day off in the middle of the summer, roughly half-way between Canada Day and Labour Day.

Since 1968, here in Toronto, the "August Civic Holiday" has actually been Simcoe Day. It honours the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe. In my neighbourhood, more attention is actually paid to Simcoe in late September, when we re-enact the walk Simcoe took on the Toronto Carrying Path. In fact, one study I saw indicates that only about 15% of Toronto residents even know that the August Civic Holiday is really Simcoe Day here.

This rather makes the point. People do not care what the holiday is celebrating. They simply want the day off to relax in the middle of the summer. The day could be proclaimed the Purple People Eater's Day and people would still take it off.

I have nothing against holidays celebrating something with cultural significance. However, every holiday does not need some grand significance. People just want an occasional day off, and I see nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with the August Civic Holiday.

Photos: Western Washington

The interior of Union Station in Seattle, Washington, now mostly Sound Transit headquarters, was observed on 11-June-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's update to my photo site concludes coverage of a trip to the Pacific Northwest in June 2010 with a focus on western Washington state. New scenes this week include air travel, downtown Seattle, Discovery Park in Seattle, an elementary school reunion, wildlife in parks, downtown Bellevue, and visits with family in Bellevue and Hamilton, Washington.

Margin Notes: Groundhogs, Washrooms, Kunstler

A groundhog explored the construction equipment near Simcoe Street at the Union Station Rail Corridor in Toronto, Ontario on 31-July-2010

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Last week I may have written about a wildlife drought along the Humber River, but there seems to be no shortage elsewhere in Toronto. A raccoon stared at me for some time along the shores of Lake Ontario at dusk recently until a bicyclist chased him away, and the groundhog above took his time exploring the Union Station Rail Corridor near Simcoe Street yesterday.

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A big announcement which will impact service in and out of Toronto's Union Station came this week. Metrolinx announced that it will own and operate the "Air-Rail Link" between Pearson International Airport and Union Station, instead of SNC-Lavalin. It's hard not to view this as incredibly good news, as the process of building the airport branch will now be much more transparent, and revenue from the service will now go to Metrolinx, rather than a private company. Ontario may be finally leaving the Mike Harris era of infrastructure thinking behind.

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Toronto's first public pay washroom sat unused at the corner of Queen's Quay and Rees Street on 1-August-2010

Then again, Toronto is experimenting with pay toilets. Despite its proximity to the CN Tower, I had never bothered to go down to look at the first such public washroom at Rees Street and Queen's Quay until today. I was surprised to find it on the northwest corner of the intersection--where almost nobody walks, unless they are parked in the small lot there--not the south side of Queen's Quay where all the tourists generally wander. If it isn't doing well, I'm afraid it's all about location, location, location.

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I doubt the economy has affected washroom use, even when it costs a quarter, but I saw an interesting description of the current United States economy this week--compressive deflationary collapse. The phraseology comes from James Howard Kunstler in a recent blog post. Kunstler is an almost-amazing pessimist in his long-term view, but it's harder to argue with his short-term analysis. Near as I can tell, the United States is far closer to deflation than inflation, no matter what right-wing politicians say.