Category: General

Nuite Blah

This is a tree with light bulbs. It’s part of Nuite Blanche in Toronto. Perhaps the most damning observation about this city is that the most drab, uninspired art festival draws such a large crowd that it’s nearly un-navigable. Don’t get me wrong, some of the exhibits, including the light bulb tree, are pretty. Or well executed. But they’re all bland. Pointless. Timid beyond even the worst corporate art placed in the lobby of an insurance firm.

How about those bicycles you could pedal to generate electricity? Only a 30 minute wait, and you get to participate in a profound display of our difficult relationship with the earth. Or something. So clever and thoughtful! Imagine the tortured artistic visionary and his long struggle to convince Scotiabank, the festival sponsor, to include his daring creation.

My advice: use your peddling power to shine your bike light in the opposite direction from the Nuite Blanche exhibits.

All that’s left of the farm

There was a time when this field grew crops. Now it grows grass. Lots of grass that has to be mowed unless I want to grow dandelions and ragweed, which I don’t. If I had goats, they could eat the grass, and then I could eat the goats. If the coyotes didn’t eat them first. Apparently the farming on this land wasn’t so great, with a thin layer of soil above rock, so the previous owners retired the farm implements and left them to rust in small clustered islands. Islands I have to work around as I navigate the sea of grass with my riding mower.

Shuttered

Forest Hill. Like many large million dollar plus houses in the neighborhood, this one has plastic shutters that are purely decorative (or anti-decorative, more accurately).