Mock Turtle

… has closed. I remember the last time we went there was after their big makeover. The place looked nice but the food seemed to have slipped a notch or two, and we didn’t go back.

In other news, it looks like the City is installing traffic lights at Bloor and Walmer. Which brings an end to years of creative jaywalking.

22 Comments »

Apparently good wine is just as bad for you as bad wine.

Comments Off

So what do we think of this? Diagram is here (.pdf).

I’ve found myself using the King car quite a lot, and it really needs some help getting through downtown. You’d think that 45,000 bums on seats every day buys a certain amount of moral leverage. When it moves well, it’s an excellent system, but I’m never sure what to expect.

On the other hand, it’s not clear where the bikes go – how much room is there between the widened sidewalk and the right-hand side of the streetcar? With a bike lane squeezed in on the outer edge of the sidewalk, it could be an excellent system.

25 Comments »

Hydro seeks rate hike citing lost revenue as consumers cut usage

The popularity of energy conservation programs is hurting Toronto Hydro’s bottom line and the utility is now seeking to raise electricity rates as a result.

Update: AND

Advisory aims to allay fluorescent bulb fears

Ontario’s Electrical Safety Authority will issue a warning later this week to notify users of the unexpected way compact fluorescent light bulbs expire at the end of their long lifespan.

Ted Olechna, a provincial code engineer with the Mississauga-based authority, said he plans to post the warning on its website. The bulbs come to an end by charring around the base, producing smoke and emitting a bad smell.

That has scared some homeowners into calling fire departments, he said. But there have been no reports of fires resulting from fluorescent bulbs in Ontario, Olechna said. (emphasis added)

You can practically hear the unspoken “….yet” at the end of that…

6 Comments »

The Star is running this article about the cheapest detached house on the MLS right now. It’s described as being in the “West Annex”.

Turns out it’s on Dufferin. As in two full subway stops — several km — west of Christie Pits, which nobody in the reality-based community would even call the West Annex. They might just as easily have called it East High Park, or North Sunnyside, if we’re going by distance.

There’s real estate neighbourhood-stretching (“Upper Beach” anyone?) but whoever chose “West Annex” here really needs a smack.

1 Comment »

Unfortunately, there was no Green Card in the envelope.

10 Comments »

I tried. But after 15 minutes I started yelling at my cat so I turned off the radio.

Laurie Brown sounds like a high-school girl with half a brain, and the music sounds like something a high-school girl who thinks she is cool would play on her iPod.

We don’t need state funding for such trash. If CBC ever takes Saturday Afternoon at the Opera off the air, I will take matter into my own hands and end its misery with a cluster bomb.

9 Comments »

First impressions:

• I am really pissed that they cut the half-hour news. Malloch informed us that the news at 6 will be only 3 minutes from now on, but the full version is still available on Radio One. The listener will have a choice, she said, and she hopes that we will choose to listen to music instead, since music can tell us about reality in a way the news cannot (I swear to God she really did say that, I did not make it up).

• I will eat my hat if this stuff is really jazz. Okay, maybe 10-20% of it is jazz. The rest is elevator music.

Comments Off

Professor Socrates’ teaching evaluations.

Comments Off

It’s been almost a month since we saw Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites (in Chicago) in the same week.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District is an early-ish work by Shostakovich, the cause of his first denunciation by Stalin and so one of the last works he composed without any consciousness of the Communist Party looking over his shoulder. I don’t usually buy opera on CD (unlike J.) so despite being a longtime Shostakovich fan I’d never heard the music to this piece before. It’s a very effective work, and was persuasively brought off by the COC. The plot is a rather amoral and cynical satirical take on provincial Russian life. The title character (Katerina Izmailova) murders her father-in-law and then her husband when they get between her and her lover. She and her lover are caught (it seems through her own foolishness in confessing the crimes to a police force not really interested in investigating them) and they are both sent off to Siberia. Her lover betrays her with another woman, and the opera ends with Katerina throwing herself and her rival to their deaths in a Siberian river. It’s not the sort of piece where one develops any kind of sympathy for any of the characters–they are all pretty nasty pieces of work–though Katerina is portrayed sympathetically up to a point as a victim of the oppressive conditions of provincial Russian life.

Poulenc’s Dialogues, written some two decades later, is an altogether different kind of work. The opera derives its story from a fictionalized account of the martyrdom of the members of a real Carmelite order during the French Revolution. It’s a study of the half-dozen main characters (the remaining Carmelite nuns are chorus), exploring the psychology of religious vocation and of martyrdom in complex ways that focus more on the human element than on intricacies of doctrine. Despite the undeniable effectiveness of the Shostakovich piece, it is this opera that lingers after the event.

We have the Met opera Faust on in the background as I write this. The music is indeed very likeable.

Comments Off