Where nothing ever happens

Galerie Voltaire on Bathurst.

ROM so bad

This is a detail of the Royal Ontario Museum’s exterior wall, as seen from the inside. This part of the museum, called The Crystal, was completed just six years ago. If this little slice of dirt and decay were an aberration, I wouldn’t bother highlighting it. But everywhere you look, the same lack of foresight and quality is visible. Walls look unfinished. Space is carved up into awkwardly shaped, unusable chunks, including a couple large areas right near the main lobby. Most famously, the exterior surface had to be reworked extensively because the architect failed to anticipate the implications building a huge sloped exterior in a city that gets nearly four feet of snow per winter.

Polypores

The narwhal is an odontocete or toothed whale, but unlike all other toothed whales it has no teeth in its mouth. Instead, the male develops a long straight tooth (or tusk) that protrudes 2-3 m out of the upper left jaw. The tooth grows in a counterclockwise spiral.

Muskoka Snow Cone

To make a “Muskoka snow cone” mix one handful of the slime mold’s fruiting bodies with two large handfuls of snow. Blend until uniformly orange. For an extra treat add two ounces of Sky brand vodka before blending.

Porcupine

This is a porcupine huddled into crevice in a large rock face. When it sensed my close proximity and began to stir, I decided to leave it alone, despite a strange feeling of curiosity about the experience of getting quilled.

Bad Poets Society

“If you look out your windows you will see
Many ruined cities and enduring seas
But if you wish to sleep please close the blinds.”
-Gwendolyn MacEwen, high priestess of middlebrow emo poetry, insipid spiritualism, and conventionally structured verse.

Bulrush

Withered bulrush awaits winter’s wrath.

Voice

I did some audio recording today. It’s always strange to hear your own voice how others hear it, played back. Other technologies, in particular writing, create external representations of our thoughts and persons, but none is so intimate, so eerily similar yet different from our internal perceptions, as audio. After listening to the playback for a while, I can’t even hear my own voice, not really, and even the meaning of my words grows fuzzy, until all I can make out is the tangle of interwoven tones and intonations, all sound and no substance.

Empty

Robarts library reflected in the windows of the new Rotman building on the University of Toronto campus.

To the fall

To the fall, to the fall, to the fall we blow
Goodbye kisses, bid winter hello
Feel the pine needles give way below
Winter, sweet winter hello
Steal my sun, I’ll be your only one
To the fall, to the fall, to the fall we blow