CFTO evening news (oops early senior’s moment CTV Toronto News) did a story on the unsightly blue box tonight. Tom Hayes reported that since the blue bin program started 20 years ago, they’ve been increasing the amount of stuff that goes into the bin and so the bin had to grow. Um no. Here’s a thought: the frequency of pickup had to increase NOT decrease. The illogic of trying to get people to recycle more while decreasing frequency of pickup boggles my mind. But let’s continue.

As the person-on-the-street mentioned, she doesn’t even have to walk out her front door, she just has to look out her window, and there they are: big butt-ugly bins hogging the sidewalks and the visual line of sight. These bins are so big, they do not fit! As Hayes points out, they are changing the esthetics of the entire city. So much for aspiring to be once again Toronto the beautiful or the clean.

“I thought we cared what the city looks likes,” said the person on the street. Apparently not.

The fact that Councillors and city staff members actually thought that these bins would fit and not pose a safety hazard (more later) shows how utterly out of touch they are with the realities of city living when you can’t afford hired help and to rent storage areas. Or in Glenn De Baeremaeker’s case, be in love with garbage. After all, only someone who loves the sight and smells of garbage would actually come out with this stupid line:

“When we go to the garbage bin system, we’ll have a nice row lined up like soldiers of garbage bins, all basically the same shape size colour and function. It’ll be very efficient. And I think it’ll look actually better esthetically on most streets.”

And if you don’t like it, tough. “Get used to it,” he, Mr. Garbage, adds.

If you don’t believe me, that I quoted him exactly, check out the list of videos in the blue band on the mid-right side of the screen: Blue boxes an eyesore for some residents.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m fighting this Councillor’s arrogance. I looked out my window recently and saw the first line of soldiers hitting the sidewalks in my neighbourhood and wondered where I’d walk. You see, the bins take up half the sidewalk at least — and these are just the FIRST rollout, there is another set coming — which means I’m relegated to the edge of the sidewalk, not the safest place to be. In the winter between snow banks and bins, there would be nowhere to walk except the road…where the cars are.

But wait, it gets better. After the garbage men came through, flinging bins hither and thither, there was nowhere to walk. I could walk two steps, pick up bins, walk three steps, move bins, walk two steps, pick up bins, or I could walk on the road, keeping ears out for cars and get home in a timely manner. What about the poor mobility challenged? Finally the snow is gone, they can go out again, hurray. Oh but wait, it’s garbage day. Now the sidewalks are for bins, not humans, certainly not humans with canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and scooters or buggies.

Get used to it, says Mr. Garbage. Get used to only being able to use our sidewalks 6 days out of 7; get used to having to use the roads as sidewalks in the winter time every garbage day; get used to a garbage esthetic because that is what Toronto is becoming unless you e-mail your Councillor and the Target70 team and tell them this is unacceptable. You won’t be alone. I understand the Target70 team can’t keep up with the irate calls from Torontonians to get rid of the butt-ugly bins and return to a saner method of pickup. Perhaps we should start flooding Mr. Garbage’s e-mail box too. After all, he should be at least half as harassed as we are with this new insane pickup method.

Jack Lakey of the Toronto Star continues his week’s worth of columns on the shabby TTC. Today he went to pigeons’ paradise aka Kipling and Islington stations, called a war zone by one reader and, like a falling-down house, sported numerous buckets to catch the drips from the roof. The janitors are nothing if not ingenious when trying to do the work of twice their number:

“To deal with the water leaking above a staircase, a large sign was placed in a janitor’s garbage cart and ingeniously angled to funnel the water into the cart.”

IMHO the TTC ought to have one janitor per station, and I suspect that they used to because back in the shining TTC days, I remember seeing janitors far more often than now. And if there have always been only one for roughly every two stations, then they used to be far more efficient than today. Of course, it does help to have garbage cans, oh sorry, litter receptacles in the stations at platform level. Torontonians have a real aversion to carrying garbage for more than a centimeter. I saw a screwed-up napkin and empty pop bottle on a subway seat the other day. Ewwww. Is it really that difficult to carry such light items through a door, along the platform, up the steps, and to the “receptacle”? Obviously.

But who knew that the real problem of removing the garbage cans from subway platforms is fires? The cans were removed due to terrorist threat post 9/11 and because all subway systems were doing it.

But “the litter problem on platforms and the subway tracks has the TTC rethinking that policy. A transit employee told us several small fires are ignited each week when trash comes into contact with the electrified third rail.”

Halifax Eurekas 1906 of the CHL - Coloured Hockey League

In keepinmg intouch with my Canadian Black History research I can across some information about the the game of Hockey and it’s early years. Pretty interesting stuff. I also came across George and Darril Fosty’s book Black Ice which I am currently in the hunt for so I can read it in full.

Here is a post from the Black Athlete Sports Wire:

CELEBRATING OUR BLACK SPORTS HEROES- HOCKEY STYLE!

February is Black History Month.It is also “Hockey is for Everyone Month.” Since 2003, the National Hockey League has set aside the month of February to honor the contributions of blacks to the sport of hockey. To those of you who don’t follow the sport because it’s perceived as only a sport that “white people with no teeth play” are saying to yourselves, “what contributions?”

You may know of current players such as Anson Carter and Jerome Iginla. You may even know of such black hockey pioneers like Willie O’Ree and Grant Fuhr. But that’s as far as it goes. But there is a lot more that blacks have given to the sport of hockey that even an avid hockey fan like myself didn’t even know about.

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What!!! One of the best music stores in the city has filed for bankruptcy. Songbird Music had stripped itself down from a double store front to a single one last winter. Now in liquidation mode. Damn! Proof positive that the people who made Queen Street West “QUEEN STREET WEST” are getting gentrified.

I chatted with a former fixture of the Queen West area about his exodus last month. “Well it was really a matter of rents” (over $150,000 in two years). Um, I think that would give a reasonably successful store reason enough to revert to an online storefront and pack up and leave the street for good. The tone of the street is changing with this rent gouging. Sad but true but I can be sure Queen St W doesn’t need to be another Bloor W. With the “slick” shops and generic mall stores moving in who knows what will happen. The Horseshoe trudges on and hopefully will have something to cheer about Queen Street in the years to come.

Songbird Music R.I.P
The Toronto Song Bird appeared in October, 1988. It moved to a bigger store a few doors down Queen Street West in 1992.

TheStar.com | GTA | Bigger bins no small problem

My response to that article was succinct and not for public consumption. Living in this city is becoming more exhausting with each pronouncement by city council. The reason why people look to the past and sigh that life was simpler back then was that life was less regulated, less stressed by government, less infantalized, freer. I’m sure government started imposing rules and regulations before I was born, but I swear they’ve accelerated like a druggie on a logarithmic curve. Take garbage (yes, please, take my garbage!). Back in the bad old simpler days, everyone put out all their garbage in whatever receptacle they wanted. On Wednesdays huge items that didn’t fit in bags or bins were picked up. Twice a week everything — that’s right folks EVERYTHING — was picked up. The streets were clean, gardens were gardens, and people didn’t waste time and brain power sorting their garbage. Everyone could participate, no matter how infirm or poor or overworked because bags are lighter than bins, brain power wasn’t required as everything went into one bag or bin and everything went out the same day of the week, the poor and overworked didn’t have to spend what adds up to hour or hours each week sorting and hauling out the garbage. For the infirm, poor, and overworked, garbage was quick and easy and even they could participate. Then recycling was introduced.
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After my first day looking, my first condo visit, and my first big disappointment, I was exhausted. My memories of the CityPlace’s Superclub are still fresh. I can still see in my mind’s eye the indoor track, the basketball court, the two bowling lanes and even the massage room. I might have made up that last part. It was three floors of fitnessy goodness. Shame.

After that first unit, things get pretty hazy. All the units I saw mesh into a blur. A few units stand out. Like the one in the Esplanade.
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Photo by Points North

I’d vaguely paid attention to the city’s interesting new snow removal policy — let nature do it — but now I understand their new attitude. If you look out from way up on high, the sun seems to be melting all that snow, not much of the white stuff left…compared to a couple of days ago anyway. And then you walk out the front door and enter a tunnel of snow, banks knee-deep high, then hip-high, and finally waist-high. You step out onto your friendly neighbourhood road where surely the going will be easier, the snow ruts being only calf-high. But mushy is harder to walk on than packed.

The weather forecasters said there would only be a few flurries on Saturday, just lake effect flakes, they said before the big storm would hit. I’m not sure who underestimated that lake effect more: the forecasters or the city, for the city thought it wasn’t worth hauling the plows out for, according to the media, until well after the real storm hit, leading to more and more interesting driving on the day the forecasters said go out and shop for tomorrow shall be impassable. And today as we face more flurries this week, we’d better get used to those snow ruts rising as the city believes that if there’s a sun, even if it’s behind crying clouds, there’s no need for a plow. Their years-old policy of not clearing laneways has grown to encompass side streets. Our tax dollars are far better spent on parking lots and growing capital debt than on basic city services. Well, at least there is one good thing — the struggle to walk out of our side streets to the cleared main streets should build up those flabby thigh muscles and burn that spare tire. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Well, I’m back from my time off from blogging. It’s been quite interesting. Went out for lunch recently, something quiet, something good to nosh on, a time to relax and let the mind go blank. But then a young woman came breezing in and plunked herself down at the table beside me, opposite a very patient man. He’d been waiting about the time it took me to order, get my meal, make serious inroads into it, and watch him finally order a bowl of soup. He quickly ordered a main. She was talking through her own soup when his steaming hot lunch arrived. She stopped waving her spoon around and dove it into the end of his loaf, the end closest to her, and said, “This looks so good, you don’t mind if I try some.” Now, what’s a guy to do? He was gracious and said, “Go ahead.” I wonder if he just didn’t care about her slobbered-on spoon desecrating his meal or decided to eat up to but not that portion of his loaf. I left before I discovered the answer to my question.

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Sitting semi-comatose on the subway train, waiting in the station for who knows what reason, I stared mindlessly out the open train doors. Into view scurried a little hump-backed, deep brown-furred creature with a thin, long tail. Blink. Pause. Blink, blink, blink. The hallucination didn’t disappear. Instead it sniffed between the raised yellow circles on the yellow warning band that edges the subway platform, and it went hither and thither on the trail of crumbs and kleenex bits dropped by your typical TTC patron. I sat up. Was it coming closer? Nope. It swooped away from the doors and scurried out of view. The chimes sounded, the doors closed, and I had no photo of this first-in-a-lifetime event. (Acutally it’s the third rat sighting I’ve had late this year, and I don’t think I’ve seen 3 in all the decades before that.) The shock made me forget all about getting a photo! It even struck me dumb. And I became rather nervous when I had to leave the train, looking hard to the floor to the left and right of me. I should’ve shouted, “RAT!”

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The Toronto Maple Losers, um, Leafs have apparently become a hot topic. I’ve long since grown bored with the Leafs. They never win, they never even look like they’re going to win, and their owners clearly don’t care as they’re raking in the cash in bumps and hikes of millions and millions. At least in Harold Ballard’s day, his antics and controversies — which makes today’s look like so much milky mush — overshadowed their perennial losing and kept us amused. Now the faceless corporate entities don’t even do that. They just hide in their counting house, ca-chinging the money flowing in. Rats!

Dark Hand and Lamplight are in town this week as part of Pleasure Dome. Dark Hand and Lamplight are a collaboration of Toronto musician Doug Paisley and artist Shary Boyle. A truly amazing musical and visual project. They are in Toronto this weekend after a celebrated tour in the US opening for Will Oldham (PRINCE “BONNIE” BILLY, PALACE, WILL OLDHAM, THE CONTINENTAL OP). For the project “Dark Hand and Lamplight”, Paisley wrote a collection of songs which Boyle uses as the basis for live drawings. Dark Hand creates art that surrounds Lamplight. The two feed off each other’s material often coming up with interesting improvisations.

Dark Hand and Lamplight share the stage with Liss Platt. Platt will be premiering a newly edited version of “You Can’t Get There From Here”. The film will be projected using a bicycle-powered 16mm projector ( designed by Petra Chevrier and Martin Heath).

See Dark Hand and Lamplight this Saturday as part of Pleasure Dome - Live Projections!

Performances by Shary Boyle with Doug Paisley and Liss Platt
Saturday, November 24, 8pm
Latvian House, 491 College St.
$10 at the door
$5 for members or students

Photo by Points North

Driving in Toronto is a nightmare. There’s really no such thing as rush hour, no matter what the experts say. You sit in traffic going into the city at all hours practically, especially on the 401. You sit in traffic leaving the city. And as you sit, you get to look at rusting medians, potholes, and brown weeds, never mind belching trucks trying to mow you down. You stand on the subway during “off” hours and wade through litter at the main stations. You wait forever for a bus, then have nowhere to sit and the drivers won’t call out the stops and you can’t see out the windows to see where you are, that is if you know the area anyway.

So I want to talk about transit and where the parties stand. I wanted to go straight to the sources, and not through the media filter. It should have been a simple matter of clicking to the Ontario party pages, seeing a link to their campaign promises and then some sort of link about transit or infrastructure or roads, right? Wrong!
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