Mock Turtle » Dalton48

Real estate geography

Dalton48 — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:00:53 +0000

Where would you guess this is:

Beautiful Semi-Detached 4 Bedroom Brick Home In Annex, Corner Lot, Det Brick Garage, Private Drive.

To be generous, Seaton Village? Past Christie Pits? But no:

Steps To Public/ Seperate Schools, Dovercourt Park And Tennis Courts, Dovercourt Boys & Girls Club (Full Daycare/Children s Programs). Minutes To Dufferin Grove Park…

It’s here.

Through the magic of real estate the central city could be reduced to a handful of neighbourhoods with inflated boundaries — a whole different neighbourhood map.

Blame the victim (again and again)

Dalton48 — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 03:53:07 +0000

Even when the circumstances in pedestrian deaths clearly point to driver error, Toronto police don’t hesitate to point the finger at the person who wasn’t behind the wheel of the vehicle:

Sgt. Tim Burrows said the victim was crossing slightly west of the crosswalk at the intersection.

“It’s difficult to determine who is at fault,” he said. But he added the pedestrian was crossing in a way that was “not predictable and not the safest place to be” but was walking on a green light.

“I’d rather just say that road safety is a shared responsibility and everyone has to do their part and abide by the laws and common sense.”

I’m sure that’s what he’d rather say, because to say otherwise would suggest that the pedestrian was not at fault and, like the vast majority of those struck down by cars in the last couple of weeks, had every right to expect to make it across the street alive if every user of the road was alert and obeying traffic law.

However, it’s just dishonest. If the pedestrian was crossing Davenport “slightly west of the crosswalk” while the car coming north on Symington was turning left, i.e. west, on a green light, the driver could not have been looking while making the turn or else she (as the story reports her to be) would have seen the pedestrian. Take a look at the intersection in Google Street View if you doubt me.

Comments sections of the major papers, always depressing, are full of self-righteous drivers who complain of pedestrians who “dart in or out of traffic.” Toronto police seem to have decided that, all evidence to the contrary, this “darting” phenomenon is the cause of pedestrian-car accidents and is pulling walkers aside to reprimand them for jay-walking — which, of course, is legal as long as you’re not right beside a crosswalk. Wouldn’t it make more sense to educate drivers on that point so they’re keeping an eye out for legal crossers? Perhaps the fact that most of the accidents have actually happened at crosswalks is telling? And I know it’s a lost cause, but perhaps some real, sustained traffic enforcement is a thought?

Authenticity watch: the child-like child

Dalton48 — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 01:44:05 +0000

A proud parent of a four-year-old, from a nauseating story about parents who tweet as their preschoolers:

“Roan’s all about superheroes and Scooby Doo and running around in his jammies. He’s still maintaining his child-like innocence so it’s fun to portray that sometimes.”

Interesting example

Dalton48 — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:32:09 +0000

Another day, another woe-is-Gen Y story. In all seriousness, Canada’s poor mechanisms of getting new graduates into the workforce are an ongoing problem. But this latest story on the front page of the Report on Business isn’t particularly compelling:

Elizabeth Adams, 24, knows all about timing. She recently graduated with a fine arts degree and hoped for a career as a painter or a photographer in Peterborough, Ont. But she’s failed to find work in her field.

What, really? There are so many things wrong with this, it’s almost hard to know where to start. Elizabeth: it’s not timing, it’s your field. How many jobs as “painter” are there, ever? Or even gallery positions? And in Peterborough(population 135,000)?

Contagion risk (non-flu version)

Dalton48 — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 03:52:57 +0000

Business reporters fell over each other today in an effort to categorize the impact of Dubai’s announcement that it was implementing a six-month “stand-still” on the debt of the real estate arm of its conglomerate Dubai World, essentially asking debtholders to hold onto bonds past maturity. Complicating the efforts of reporters to put the story into context was the fact that it is both American Thanksgiving and Eid Al-Adha in the Gulf, leading to an unusual absence of groupthink. So the shock of the Dubai default is either:

a. Similar to the Russian government’s default on its GKOs (short-term T-bills) in 1998, which led to the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management and — in retrospect — relatively short-lived market turmoil;
b. Akin to the Panic of 1907 (not really)
c. The Great Recession’s Creditanstalt, dragging Europe from its half-hearted recession into full-blown depression.

The ultimate effect won’t be clear for a while. (A conference call scheduled for today had to be cancelled because the phone lines were overwhelmed with worried investors, which didn’t help in soothing concerns.) There’s speculation Dubai could be forced to sell assets, such as major pieces of London real estate, to raise cash, which would certainly shake things up. British and European investors have by far the most exposure.

Perpetuating inequality

Dalton48 — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:03:52 +0000

David Cay Johnston on why the government’s lack of interest in cracking down on Canadian users of tax havens is a problem:

“If the current law does not give the government the investigative tools to find wealthy and sophisticated tax cheats, then those tools need to be provided. Otherwise, you have a de facto policy that says that wage earners cannot cheat, because the government has a record of their income, but business owners, investors, and landlords can. That’s morally indefensible.”

Ernie and Bert were always pretty racy

Dalton48 — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:48:54 +0000

Infamous subway-riding 9-year-old’s mother Lenore Skenazy details her questionable viewing habits:

We got the DVD set of Sesame Street from the early years. It shows kids just having fun in groups, playing on a vacant lot, playing on the playground and playing follow the leader. Before any of this is shown to you, there’s a warning: “For adult viewing only.” In just one generation, the idea of what’s safe and normal and ideal has changed.

Eight years on

Dalton48 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:44:44 +0000

This is how I felt that day: like something might come swooping down out of the sky at any time, that no place was safe, not the streets I walked along in my new high heels (heading out of the financial district: the streetcars were jammed, traffic at a standstill). When I walked along Bloor St. the sky was blue and sunny and the mood ominous with every store’s door open and every radio tuned to the same station with the same terrible news.

The Economist’s headline later in the week was “The Day the World Changed,” and I thought, as I looked at the peaceful pastel photo of a slow-motion jet careening toward the World Trade Center, that I hadn’t wanted it to.

It was quieter than ever without the jets overhead those few days – I think I was on a flight path, though it hadn’t really occurred to me before – but all the remaining sound seemed a million times louder. And then, for ages, everything seemed more sinister: a plane overhead too loud, a mysterious shutdown of the subway, flickering lights in my old house, sirens. All the everyday sounds of the city, and of an unattacked city at that, now frightening, peace-disturbing.

September 1999

When the buildings were bombed in Moscow it was the reaction I found frightening: the uniformed militia on the street, the guns they carried, their grim faces. The explosions were terrifying enough, to be sure – while you slept, terrorists might come and blow up your nondescript apartment building — and the targets were all in wooded suburban areas, just like mine. But it was the reaction afterward that kept the fear going, the soldiers marching two by two around the blocks, the empty streets, the suspicious looks when you threw even a gum wrapper into a rare garbage can. Everything was touched. I got off the subway to change trains and a soldier halfway up the stairs barked out orders to another who pulled darkish men away to have their papers checked: Him! To the left!

But somehow less terrifying for me to be in Moscow while terrorists worked in September 1999 than to be a thousand miles from New York in September 2001.

The night after the second apartment building in Moscow was bombed – another couple hundred killed in their beds, white faces on people in the metro, talk of a state of emergency, “cherezsluchayniye sitzuatzia” – I was watching the television news, one program after another. ORT for an hour, then RTR, NTV, TV6. I lived in a furnished apartment with another Canadian girl who had been AWOL for the first month and only occasionally home since. The television was a clunker, a 19-or-more-inch that broadcast everything in sepia. And then, that night, as I was halfway through my evening ritual of language improvement (by the third or fourth newscast, I could be sure I was understanding the news of the day with some accuracy), the British owner of the TV set arrived out of the blue to take it back.

After he left I felt slightly scared. Seeing video of reporters in front of already-bombed buildings, uninterrupted by breaking news of other terakti, had been somewhat comforting. Sitting in the kitchen, staring at the fading green-and-brown striped wallpaper while trying to find Ekho Moskvi, the talk radio station, less so.

Some apartments arranged shifts to guard their buildings 24-hours-a-day. It never took off in my building, where for much of the day and early evening there was sure to be someone outside in the lane in front of the building working on a Lada anyway, or the man in heavy black-framed glasses and fatigues doing something with his army transport truck, his mean-looking , sweet-natured German shepherd nearby. I once left the house early in the morning on my way to work and, seeing the dog, backed up pathetically to the building’s entrance again, murmuring, tremulously, “please… I’m scared of dogs… please.” The fatigue(d) man had looked at me in exasperation and assured me the dog was good, gentle, while I cowered nearby. He grabbed the dog by the collar and put it in my path, poor sad lame thing, leg in a cast. That fucking dog made me shake; I couldn’t even imagine how to be scared of random Chechen terrorists.

Narita

Later that year the spectre of terrorism touched my life again. I was on my way home with a stopover in Paris, where the major airport, as many in the U.S. would go on to do, had abolished its luggage checkroom after some bombs in the late eighties/early nineties. Not knowing this, and having planned a four-day stopover, and being met by a friend who knew a convenient route into town on the metro, I ended up dragging six months of my life through a street market in a left bank arrondissement to the hotel. In Tokyo, where, in very precise fashion, garbage cans had been eliminated from the actual subway lines where the sarin gas attack of 1996 had taken place, but not from the many connecting and very analogous commuter train lines, I’d ended each day with pockets full of sticky wrappers, an irritating but not back-breaking inconvenience.

Japan figured into my second terrorist-prompted inconvenience in France, when at the airport the Air France agent checking passports as we boarded the plane flipped through my half-empty Canadian passport looking for something of interest after my unexciting answers to her questions.
“Ahhh… Narita,” she said pointedly. “What were you doing in Narita?”
“I was working in Tokyo. As a teacher.”
“Na-REE-ta,” she said again, turning the passport sideways and upside down. “Narita.”
I might be there still, listening to her hypnotise herself with the magic Japanese name again and again, if I hadn’t grabbed the passport from her hands and proceeded to give my boarding pass to the agent behind her. I was steaming with indignation, halfway through writing a complaint on the tear-out card in the Air France magazine when the Scottish Airbus engineer who was my seatmate arrived.
“Bad flight?” he asked, nodding toward the complaint card. I began to reply but left it as an indignant yelp. After a gin and tonic I’d relaxed and we engaged a game to see just how long the attendant call button could be lit without an Air France flight attendant stopping by. We had to call it quits after an hour and forty-five minutes because I was laughing too hard.

The Special Forces

But what comes to my mind next is another funny story that isn’t really funny. A few years earlier, in Russia, sometime in the autumn, which ends early in St. Petersburg, so let’s say September. I was taking an intensive Russian program at the university and living in a huge dormitory, the obshezhitzye, on a road whose name I couldn’t pronounce on the Gulf of Finland. A thousand students maybe, or hundreds at least, not all students, most Russian, but lots of foreigners in town for different courses. There was security at the obshezhitzye, a turnstile with a plexiglassed kiosk next to it, just like in the metro. The kiosk was staffed by a woman in a flowered pinafore and her husband, who always appeared to be drunk. At night sometimes grandpa came on the shift, while during the day sometimes three or four family members crowded in the kiosk, at no point appearing to pay the slightest attention to anyone going in or out.

Not that it mattered, because all the rooms – miniature suites, really, of two or more bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom – had large steel doors, just like a prison. Apart from the heroin addicts who showed up from time to time to take their stash hidden in the fire extinguisher cabinet at the end of the hall – and the tall black-leather jacketed men who had showed up and kicked the door to the apartment opposite the cabinet, which seemed to have some connection to the heroin (never was I more glad that my name was not Sasha) – the obshezhityze was a calm and secure place. There were two telephones in the entire building and the French female students tried to establish order over the phone chaos by putting up neat schedules for expected calls, which everyone else ignored.

But one day, while I was at class, terrorism struck the obshezhitzye. Actually, not terrorism, although there was some momentary terror involved, all at the hands of the finest special troops, the OMON. Unexpectedly, at some point in the mid-afternoon, a bus rolled up and troops in fatigues (different ones from those described above, more colourful ones, OMON ones) poured out. They ran in some kind of formation, machine guns at the ready, taking positions in order to storm the building. The few residents coming in and out scattered, hiding behind garbage bins and parked Chaikas nearby. No word on what steps the kiosk family took, their authority could not have been difficult to overrun. The poor students who were at home hid themselves under beds, unsure as to what was happening – was there a dangerous criminal on the loose? (Perhaps an even angrier drug dealer.) Or were the OMON hunting down the residents themselves?

Eventually, exercise completed, the special forces troops packed up and left. There was not a trace of their reign of terror by the time I returned from my classes.

The day the world changed
And what is the point to all this reminiscence? In part to point out that at one time terrorism was a foreign novelty, something slightly disturbing that could be left behind by sitting on a plane for eight hours, something to add colour to dinner-party stories about travelling.

And perhaps the point I’m making is that it all seems abstract and overblown when it’s not you that’s the target. Ask any Canadian.

I laugh about it. We all do, especially now, after eight years of packing toiletries in clear plastic bags and shuffling through the airport in holey socks. But there is always a tremor of tension somewhere in my body, one that wasn’t there the day before the day my world changed.

Preposition watch

Dalton48 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:37:25 +0000

They’re endangered.

From a BlogTO review of Te Aro:

This newish Leslieville cafe may not have a ton of tables to plunk a laptop, but the beauty of the space more than makes up for it.

What is so hard about turning it into English by adding “on which” before “plunk”, or even just “onto” after “tables”?

One-way battle in the spin wars

Dalton48 — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:06:57 +0000

The Star lovingly recreates Bryant’s last night as a man not under suspicion, while in the meantime, Partisan Hobo notes:

…there’s no PR firm to save the deceased man’s image. I don’t even know him, but I know he came from a broken home, that he is a visible minority, that he has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, that he’s the unmarried father of several children, that he had no formal “career”, that he had more than one interaction with police in more than one city prior to his death. None of this is really relevant to the public interest. Mostly it’s just prejudicial detail that helps some people imagine a man who lived on the edge and was bound to experience violence of some kind at some point.