Bees

Re the link to the new beekeeping site: You might find this interesting — David Yassky, an up-and-coming Brooklyn city councillor, has taken up the crusade to legalize urban beekeeping.  Apparently there are quite a few underground (or more precisely rooftop) apiculturists operating in the shadows of the city.  Two links below — the secondcontinue reading

Okay, that’s pretty helpless.

HT to Val Dodge’s blog: I first saw Beyond the Orchard apple slices in the local Sobeys in early January, but didn’t see it again until mid-March. They’ve been in stock steadily since then, so presumably people are buying them. This package­­­­—a plastic box containing five individual sealed wrappers—contains just 285 grams of sliced apples,continue reading

Change in tone

Months of smug, rah-rah, our market’s different from every other area with a housing boom in the world coverage are followed inevitably by: Scotiabank: [T]here is growing evidence of overvaluation in home prices in some parts of the country — a precursor to a period of softening conditions… the further domestic home prices climb above underlyingcontinue reading

Flickering lights, freezing blasts

Today’s announcement on phasing out incandescent light bulbs by 2012 is supposed to be good news. But once again, today’s announcement overlooks one of the biggest and fastest-growing causes of peak demand during our not-all-that-hot, not-all-that-long summers: air conditioning. More homes in Ontario have air conditioning than anywhere else in the country — although thecontinue reading

Forget about toppled toddlers

…it’s their parents we should be worried about: The young man had been wheeled into Najma Ahmed’s emergency room with a bloody, penetrating wound to the chest. Whatever was inside had pierced his left lung dangerously close to the heart. His sternum was also fractured. “It looked like a bullet wound,” said Dr. Ahmed, assistantcontinue reading

In the “silver lining” category…

Well, at least we were home at the time.  Friday morning we were procrastinating over breakfast & the newspaper when there was a crashing noise from downstairs followed by the sound of water rushing through the pipes.  We ran to the basement to see water gushing through one of the potlight fixtures in the basementcontinue reading