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 thiscontinue reading
“West Annex”?
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.continue reading
The certificate finally arrived
Unfortunately, there was no Green Card in the envelope.
The Signal
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 suchcontinue reading
Tonic
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 listencontinue reading
Mildly funny
Professor Socrates’ teaching evaluations.
Two modern operas
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 thecontinue reading
A gigantic state-funded iPod
We tuned in for the last day of old CBC evening programming last night–we tend to have “Music for a while” on over dinner most evenings and J. is a huge “After Hours” fan. “In Performance” had its last show on Thurs. but we left the Friday version on mainly out of inertia (it’s acontinue reading
All good things come to an end
CBC Radio 2 is radically revamping their evening and night schedule starting next Monday. The thrust seems to be in the direction of projecting a more populist-middlebow, soft-nationalist image for the evening lineup, consistent with a trend that started many years ago (in 1985(!), according to the web site) with Jurgen Gothe’s Disc Drive ascontinue reading
Finch, Eglinton LRTs in the works
The TTC is apparently about to announce a light rail plan for Finch and Eglinton Avenues. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out. I am still not really convinced, based on the Spadina LRT experience, that LRTs as currently conceived are going to be a major improvement on ordinary bus andcontinue reading