Quotulatiousness

December 18, 2018

Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:

Seasonal Melodies

James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:

This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.

It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”

This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.

Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.

Note that singular. “Tape”.

Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …

So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.

We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.

To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.

Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.

And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It’s been over 20 years 30 years now, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two three decades.

December 13, 2018

Toronto’s own “Most Precious Citizens”

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Selley on a tempest-in-a-teapot that is convulsing Toronto’s Cabbagetown residents:

Houses in a typical Cabbagetown street in Toronto.
Photo by Alain Rouiller via Wikimedia Commons.

Every city has its Most Precious Citizens — that hyper-privileged group of over-comfortable supposed progressives who are too hopelessly tone-deaf to realize the rest of the city can’t stand them. MPCs can serve a valuable unifying purpose: Residents from all walks of life, who might otherwise struggle to share common experience, can bond in mutual appreciation of their ridiculousness.

Torontonians are truly blessed to have the Quintessential Cabbagetowners to play this role. These folks make the Ward’s Islanders look blue-collar. Riverdale might as well be a 1950s Welsh coal mining village. And the Quintessential Cabbagetowners’ most recent performance has been a classic: A businessman wants to open a daycare in a lovely corner house with storefront space. The MPCs have been freaking out in ways that have their reality-based neighbours hiding their heads between their knees.

Some claim a daycare is simply incompatible with Cabbagetown’s gorgeous 19th-century Victorian row houses. As a “de facto commercial operation,” one resident complained, it would represent “a slippery slope for this iconic neighbourhood” and “an outrage.”

“This is standard-issue capitalism run amok,” a local resident told the magazine Toronto Life. He’s a mining executive, which is absolutely perfect.

The most precious quailed at the thought of hearing children at play. “The idea of tolerating (it) is frankly ludicrous, and completely incongruent with this, or any other, residential corner in this city,” one couple wrote to the city.

More reasonable folks claim daycare in Cabbagetown is a fine idea, just “not on this particular street,” because it is “too narrow,” with “too many cars on it.” That describes all streets in Cabbagetown, though.

Toronto’s downtown neighbourhoods

November 18, 2018

The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855

Filed under: Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published on 26 Oct 2018

In 1855 Toronto, a fireman and a clown walked into a brothel. What followed would change the course of one of the world’s great cities.

The episode is intended for educational purposes. All events are portrayed in historical context. No graphic depictions of violence are included.

The History Guy uses media that are in the public domain. As photographs of actual events are sometimes not available, photographs of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

October 17, 2018

How Toronto got its name

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Colby Cosh on the origins of the name of Canada’s largest city (which, surprisingly, isn’t the Mississauga name for “big stink on the water”):

Detail from a 1688 map of western New France by Vincenzo Coronelli that locates “Lac Taronto” at Lake Simcoe.
City of Toronto Culture Division/Library and Archives Canada via the National Post

By the time of Franquelin, “Tkaronto” had already become “Taronto,” a generic name for the highway between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario. The Humber River was called the Toronto River by the French before Gen. John Graves Simcoe and the British got hold of everything. The word, in turn, became attached to a trading settlement at the southern end of the trail — a pretty crummy place, by all accounts, but one destined for bigger things as part of a global seafaring empire.

The miracle is that it held on to the name. Simcoe insisted that “Toronto,” on being anointed as the site of the new capital of Upper Canada in 1793, be dubbed “York” in honour of Prince Frederick (1763-1827), Duke of York and second son of George III. This Duke of York is the “Grand Old Duke of York” from the satirical verse about military futility. He was also commander-in-chief of the British armies that helped to chase Napoleon out of Europe twice, and is thought to deserve genuine credit for this, so be careful who you write insulting rhymes about.

Simcoe dubbed Toronto “York” just because he was sucking up to a very identifiable future boss, and for no other reason. The people of Toronto seem to have understood this and resented it. In the decades to come, it was occasionally observed that there were something like a dozen other places in Upper Canada called “York.” Moreover, Simcoe’s “Little York,” as it was often called, seems to have presented an increasingly embarrassing parallel with the Americans’ bustling New York.

In 1834, when the Legislative Council of Upper Canada decided that the capital needed to be formally incorporated as a city, the citizenry remembered that they belonged to “Toronto” and appealed to the council to have the more musical old name restored. Over four decades their annoyance had not receded. Diehards who wanted York to remain York for imperial-grandeur reasons were outvoted, and Toronto’s formal Act of Incorporation observes that “it is desirable, for avoiding inconvenience and confusion, to designate the Capital of the Province by a name which will better distinguish it.” The appellation “Toronto,” of course, had actually been nicked from a spot some way off, but the white settlers had mislaid that information, and didn’t check with anyone who would know better.

September 21, 2018

Doug Ford is a bit like Trump in the way he gets his critics to froth and fizz on demand

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For all the claims that Doug Ford would be “just like Trump”, they’re not all that similar, but one way the Ontario Premier does resemble the American President is the way that they both can send their opponents into rhetorical hysteria almost without effort:

Doug Ford at the 2014 Good Friday procession in East York, Canada.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

As much as Ford’s government has violated political norms, we shouldn’t want the remedy to do likewise — whether it’s the feds invoking Disallowance (as a majority of Toronto city councillors voted to support) or the Lieutenant-Governor refusing Bill 31 Royal Assent (as requested Tuesday by various petitioners led by former lefty Toronto mayor John Sewell), or a judge undermining provincial authority over municipalities on grounds that collapse in higher courts.

So now, perhaps, Toronto can return to reality — or as close as you can get during an election campaign.

No, there was no magic brand of fit Mayor John Tory or hypothetical mayor Jennifer Keesmaat or anyone else could have pitched that would have stopped Ford in his tracks. Torontonians’ fits are a feature for Ford, not a bug. In defending Bill 5 he has repeatedly namechecked various left-leaning allegedly do-nothing councillors. Their apoplexy sustains him. In his book about Rob Ford, councillor John Filion quoted Doug Ford on his plans for Tory after losing the 2014 mayoral election: “He’s going to take off the sheets in bed at night and find my teeth wrapped around his nuts.”

Note that Chris Selley is careful to include the “allegedly” there … no need to invite lawsuits for the National Post.

And no, there is no real hope of relief in the ongoing appeals process over Bill 5. Even if the Supreme Court were to side with Belobaba, it would only repudiate the way in which the province wielded its powers — i.e., in the middle of an election — not the powers themselves. Had the government waited four years, or even legislated a two-year council term at 47 wards to be followed by an election at 25, it would have been on plenty-thick ice. It could easily re-legislate a 25-ward Toronto after such a ruling, and without using the notwithstanding clause.

Toronto politicians are destined to be Doug Ford’s favourite punching bag at least until they stop reacting so hysterically every time he so much as looks in their direction. He may not be a Twitter troll of the same mastery as Donald Trump, but he doesn’t appear to need social media to get his critics all panty-bunched.

Similarly, while there is no telling how much Ford might meddle in Toronto’s affairs in the coming years, at every step along the way he will make the idea of meddling in Toronto affairs more toxic for future non-Conservative governments. All provincial governments have screwed over Toronto now and again; as of this summer, screwing over Toronto is Something Doug Ford Does. And no Liberal or New Democrat wants to be like Doug Ford.

When things die down a bit, the opposition parties will have to take a break from denouncing Ford and explain what they’ll do in future to strengthen Toronto’s democracy: restore control over its political boundaries, provide more taxation powers, allow road tolling, whatever. It would be Pollyannaish to suggest Ford has caused a political awakening in Toronto, but he has certainly made it more attractive for the other parties to take Toronto more seriously, and concurrently much more risky for them to be seen reneging on such promises in future.

September 8, 2018

A key statistic in the debate over gun violence in Toronto … turns out to be an invention

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Matt Gurney on an important claim in the controversy about guns and crime in Toronto — that will probably not get anything like as much coverage because it doesn’t support the prohibitionists’ narrative:

Earlier this summer — a summer that has seen Toronto wracked by gun violence — a report came out that suggested lawful Canadian gun owners were to blame for at least some of the violence. The article was originally published by the Canadian Press, and was widely republished elsewhere, including at the CBC, the National Post, a dozen local newspapers, CTV News, and, yes, here at Global News. Since then, it has been widely cited in other news stories covering the issue, including in The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. The report was everywhere.

Here’s the problem. Newly released stats show clearly that it was wrong.

The article was based around an interview with a Toronto Police Services detective, Rob Di Danieli. Det. Di Danieli told the Canadian Press that Canadians who were lawfully licensed to purchase and possess firearms were increasingly a public safety issue. “They go get their licence for the purpose of becoming a firearms trafficker,” Di Danieli told the CP. “A lot of people are so ready to blame the big bad Americans, but we had our own little problem here.”

The CP article hangs on this revelation from the detective. It notes, in various places, “The number of guns obtained legally in Canada but are then sold to people who use them for criminal purposes has surged dramatically in recent years compared to firearms smuggled from the United States, Toronto police say,” and, “In recent years [investigators say they] have noticed a stark shift in where guns used to commit crimes are coming from,” and, “Legal Canadian gun owners are selling their weapons illegally, Di Danieli said, noting that police have seen more than 40 such cases in recent years.”

[…]

At the time the CP story first ran, there were no publicly available stats to support (or contradict) what di Danieli had told them. But now, those numbers are publicly available, thanks to Dennis R. Young, an Alberta-based researcher who filed a Freedom of Information request with the Toronto police and published their reply on his website. And these stats tell a very different story.

July 27, 2018

Toronto’s proposed handgun ban is a feelgood/do nothing distraction

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Every time there’s a tragedy, there are calls from the local media for politicians to “do something”. Politicians are hard-wired to want to “do something” even without prompting. They want (and need, for electoral purposes) to be seen to be “doing something”, if only to divert any blamecasting away from themselves. The most recent tragedy was a senseless shooting on Toronto’s Danforth in the Greektown district. The shooter, who was either killed by police or committed suicide shortly after the attack, was apparently not a legal gun owner, and under current gun laws would not have been able to obtain a handgun. So, in the wake of the tragic deaths and injuries, Toronto city council jumped into action to be seen “doing something”. Chris Selley explains why the proposed ban of handgun and ammunition sales in the city will not make a difference, except to punish non-criminals:

The whiz-bang solution on everyone’s lips — from Mayor Tory to city councillors to the Toronto Star’s and Globe and Mail’s editorial boards and the usual activists — is to ban handguns. Tory admits there is no “magic wand” that will solve Toronto’s gun problem. But still he asks: “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”

The idea has a very superficial appeal. We all wish the Danforth shooter hadn’t managed to get a hold of a gun. Toronto is having a bad year for shootings — not much worse than last year, but at the wrong end of a distinct and steady five-year-trend. (At this point in 2014 there had been 101 shootings and 127 fatalities; so far in 2018 there have been 228 shootings and 308 fatalities.) It is understandable (if not entirely creditable) that the Danforth shooting would have rapidly intensified demands for something to be done: the victim count was high, and it happened in a wealthy part of town where it would have been easy to pretend there wasn’t a problem at all.

Still, the limitations of a “handgun ban” are both many and obvious. When Canadian police forces occasionally report on the sources of crime guns, they often find the vast majority have been smuggled across the border. In Toronto nowadays, the number is reportedly more like 50 per cent; the rest of the supply comes from licensed handgun owners who sell them on illegally — a spectacularly risky thing to do, as any used in crimes would be instantly traced back to the registered owner, but apparently worth it to some.

But we all know how permeable the Canada-U.S. border is. If we made it impossible to own a handgun legally in Canada, is there any reason to suspect the cross-border flow couldn’t regain its market share? Furthermore, CTV reported Wednesday that the Danforth shooter’s handgun was prohibited — i.e., it could never have been licensed in Canada — and that he had obtained it from some gang associates. If true, his carnage illustrates the limitations of handgun bans better than it does their efficacy.

July 24, 2018

A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: History, Italy, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 23 Jul 2018

He is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but before that, he was an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in the Great War and also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War Two.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/w…

May 18, 2018

Deploy scare quotes as required when considering the “cultural” “impact” of the suburbs

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Rick McGinnis has a thoughtful piece on the creation and evolution of the modern western suburb, in the context of the ongoing Ontario election:

Maybe it’s some remnant of our tribal past, but it’s hard for us to leave behind some impulse to fear and vilify whoever lives one village over, beyond the river or in the next valley. We might think we’re sophisticated, cosmopolitan people, but this nascent tribalism is never far from the surface, and I saw it re-emerge with a roar during recent municipal elections here in Toronto.

Back when the late Rob Ford won his surprise mayoral victory in 2010 – certainly a surprise for his opponents, who couldn’t imagine how decisively he’d win – the electoral post-mortems painted his triumph as the revenge of the suburbs that once comprised a group of independent townships over the downtown, Toronto’s older urban core.

It was a battle between the suburbs and the city, won this time by the suburbs, who rallied behind various standards – summed up in the media as a love of cars, ethnic and cultural homogeneity and lower property taxes. As with any history written by the losers – the media, for the most part, who identified as urbanite, not suburbanite – it relied on conveniently ignoring facts that didn’t fit, and the deployment of sweeping generalizations, many of them out of date – if they were ever true at all – by decades.

[…]

Up here in Ontario, the imminent provincial election means that the suburbs versus city scenario will be revived, to either apportion blame should Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford become premier, or get unpacked if he loses and the boogeyman of a monolithic voting bloc needs to be triumphantly debunked.

There remains the small matter that Ford Nation events – held inevitably in the suburbs since the heyday of Doug’s brother Rob – are visibly far more diverse than, say, the average Liberal fundraiser, and Ford opponents have been chewing on that tough gristle for nearly a decade.

Obviously, the suburbs can’t be both a politically, economically and culturally monolithic place, and a diverse, complex collection of communities mysteriously moved to unite during election cycles to oppose the prerogatives of certain political parties and the urbanites who love them. There’s a very complex story about the suburbs dying to be told, but we’re still invested in stereotypes that are decades out-of-date for the purposes of situational political utility. It’s an object lesson that politics, more than anything else, is the enemy of truth.

Diversity has joined “marriage,” “rights,” “privilege” and “family” on that list of words that we’ve come to use without sharing a common meaning, especially when we talk about places like the suburbs, what have come to mean something very different in our imaginations than they exist in reality. For the people living there – whose lived experience has nothing to do with convenient fictions – the suburbs are really just a place where a mortgage might be affordable, where you can have a front and a back yard, and where you don’t share walls with your neighbours.

April 16, 2018

QotD: The Canadian media

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ezra Levant, who now runs the Rebel Media online empire as a successor to the deceased Sun News TV network, has a long-running joke/critique about a “Media Party” that croons in unison on every public issue. Every time he mentions the “Media Party,” we, the Media Party, all fall into the same cross and scornful mood. We commiserate ironically with all our old co-workers at rival titles or channels about how there’s totally no such thing as a Media Party.

Ezra knows how to market, whatever else you want to say about him. He is out to devour our audiences and show, if mostly by loud assertion, that we in the Party are all lazy and lily-livered. He is not afraid to say that all the parts of the Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s ecosystem are inferior to his thingamabob. We don’t compete with each other like he does: we lack the spirit of the feud. We all sense there might actually be some kind of unified, monstrous Star-Globe-Post-CBC-Maclean’s publication one day. And we want to be able to work for it. So even Posties are reluctant to say that the Globe on most days appears to have been edited by a dead Tory prime minister and printed on cobwebs, or that the Star sometimes seems to regard personal nastiness as a social-democratic credential.

The National Post was born in a spirit of newspaper war. If you tried to start such a war today it would seem absurdly counterproductive, almost suicidally stupid; and maybe it was. Now we are all just hanging on for dear life.

Colby Cosh, “Go ahead, hate the media – we deserve it”, National Post, 2016-07-25.

April 8, 2018

Premier Wynne’s crazy (high speed) train proposal

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I usually start any criticism of new railway line proposals with a disclaimer that I’m actually very pro-railways. I do so because it’s absolutely true and it kind of hurts me to shoot down these wonderful-sounding schemes just because they make no economic sense whatsoever. Last week, Jen Gerson found herself doing exactly the same thing while discussing the Ontario Liberal proposal for a new high speed passenger line:

It would be good to preface this column with a confession. I love trains. I loved taking trains while tooling about in Europe in my ‘20s. I would happily trade additional travel time to enjoy the comforts of a train in favour of airport security and an airline seat.

[…]

Train lovers like myself often like to lament the fact that Canada is the only G7 nation without a high-speed rail line, as if that fact makes us technologically backward — as opposed to merely sparsely populated.

But as Feigenbaum points out, there are only two high-speed rail lines anywhere in the world that make any money after factoring in build and operating costs: Tokyo to Kyoto, and Paris to Lyon. “There is another line in Japan that breaks even. All of the rest of the High Speed Rail projects in the world lose money and some lose a lot of money,” Feigenbaum says.

“In the North American context, you need at least 3 million people in each of the metropolitan areas [you’re serving]. You need incredibly high population density in both of these cities. You need very good inner-city transit systems and you need generally low rates of car ownership.”

Toronto qualifies as a reasonable high speed rail hub by this definition. Windsor does not.

And she doesn’t even mention the almost-universal cost overruns on major infrastructure projects like this, nor delays in obtaining equipment (especially if the winning bidder is Bombardier).

I swear I have squandered days of my life thinking about this train to Windsor and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an onion of stupid. Every layer you peel away reveals some new and terrible aspect that doesn’t make any sense.

Fortunately, this is almost certainly just an election promise that will never actually go further than some lovely animations and perhaps a few physical scale models for politicians’ photo ops leading up to the vote. It will then probably disappear from the picture even if the Liberals get back into office.

January 18, 2018

Live in Toronto? Feel undertaxed? Here’s your easy solution to give the city more of your money

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley points out that in addition to your opportunity to pay more than your fare share of federal tax (Her Majesty, in right of Canada, is always happy to accept any amount you wish to donate), Toronto taxpayers are able to use a simple form to donate money to the city:

Click to see full-size image.

So here’s a proposal: Torontonians who consider themselves undertaxed should give the city the difference. Every time you get a property tax bill, you get a little blue insert inviting contributions of up to $50,000 to the program of your choice or just into general revenues. Say your house is worth $750,000. Your bill should be around $4,962, or 0.66%. If you think Mississauga’s rate (0.85 per cent) or Brampton’s rate (1.05) per cent is more appropriate, then just cut the city a cheque for the difference ($1,413 or $2,913, respectively), send it back in the envelope provided and watch for your tax receipt. There are a lot of progressive homeowners in this city. It wouldn’t take much before we were talking about real money.

Is this likely to happen? Certainly not. The inserts date from 2010, when council cancelled the vehicle registration tax. A parade of deputants to budget committee said they didn’t want the money back; council gave them an easy way to give it back; almost nobody did, and almost nobody does now. The grand total of voluntary contributions under the property tax envelope program in 2016 was $81,320.77, and one of those donations was for $50,000.

Total contributions to city programs are of course much larger. The Toronto Public Library (which I support, however modestly) issued tax receipts for $3.4 million in donations in 2016, the zoo for $1.1 million. But the city itself only issued $1.35 million in total tax receipts, even as many of us beg it to take more of our money and spend it on council-approved priorities.

It might not be fair to pay more than your neighbour. But when you tell pollsters you want to be taxed more, political strategists don’t believe you. And when Doug Ford can win 33 per cent of the vote after four years of his brother as mayor, it’s tough to say they’re misguided. You can wait for a critical mass of your fellow citizens to come around to your worldview, or you can nudge the process along with your pocketbooks. Your money is as good as anyone else’s.

December 22, 2017

Okay, Etobicoke drivers, now they’re just messing with your heads

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A recently started reconstruction project of the confusing Six Points interchange will involve closing off existing access ramps and (eventually) replacing them with new ones. During construction, however, things are just insane, as this example shows:

The above map shows what the city calls its “preferred alternate route to access Bloor Street eastbound from Kipling Avenue” due to ramp closures.
Image via BlogTO.

As you can see, it involves three huge loops winding around four corners of the intersection. If the ramp weren’t closed, it would be a simple right turn from Kipling onto Bloor heading East.

“It is often said two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do,” wrote one Redditor in response to the graphic today. “In this case, seven rights make, uh, one right.”

“I don’t care what you say,” wrote another, “that ‘Alternate Route’ looks like so much fun, I might go there just to do it!”

Don’t forget your seatbelt.

December 18, 2017

Repost – Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:

Seasonal Melodies

James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:

This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.

It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”

This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.

Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.

Note that singular. “Tape”.

Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …

So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.

We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.

To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.

Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.

And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It’s been over 20 years, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two decades.

August 24, 2017

Andrew Scheer’s latest missed opportunity to defend freedom of speech

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Selley is disappointed in federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer’s dropping the ball on defending the right to free speech in Canada:

Last week, headlines proclaimed that the University of Toronto had “barred” from campus a right-wing “group” calling itself the Canadian Nationalist Party, which was planning to hold a rally there despite objections from activists. Asked if this violated the hypothetical Conservative policy, Team Scheer said no. “I respect the right for universities to determine which outside groups they give a platform to,” he told the National Post.

Quite right. In fact, according to U of T, the “party” — which may or may not be one fellow with a website — hadn’t even contacted the university about it. If some random Facebook user announces “Rager at Selley’s Saturday Night,” I have no obligation to stock the bar.

But in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville, a Scheer spokesperson went further. Scheer would work with universities “to prevent loopholes for events that risk violating Canadian law,” CBC reported. “(Scheer) is committed to working with the universities to ensure that any policy he brings forward does not become a platform for hate speech,” said the spokesperson.

Sorry, no. That’s hopeless. Any event can be “a platform for hate speech,” if an organizer or attendee decides to make it one. The key, within reason, is that they be given the chance. Team Scheer is all but explicitly endorsing prior restraint: Person X or Group Y might be too dangerous, too likely to utter “hate speech,” for a university to vouchsafe.

As soon as you endorse that idea over a universal defence of free speech up to some reasonable definable threshold — the Criminal Code, say — you’re emboldening precisely the censors Scheer claims to want to take on. Are BDS and Israeli Apartheid Week prima facie hate speech? Is the idea of a superior white race or male gender prima facie hate speech? People disagree; universities are supposed to be free venues for those disagreements.

Meanwhile, Scheer seems to have missed an opportunity to weigh in on a whopper of a free speech dereliction at Ryerson University last week. Citing an inability “to provide the necessary level of public safety for the event to go forward, particularly given the recent events in Charlottesville,” the Toronto university cancelled a discussion concerning … er … “The Stifling of Free Speech on University Campuses.” Activists had vowed to shut down the event; they managed it without even having to close their laptops. Ryerson hasn’t formally been a university for long. A politician who (for better or worse) thinks campus free speech is his business might reasonably propose it shouldn’t be going forward.

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