Believe

Again, I did NOT PhotoShop the red nose into this picture. I shot this outside Tucson, Ariz. I saw two of these signs - the other was on the other side of the highway.
I shit you not.
If you don't believe me, Rudolph will bypass your house completely and you won't even get a lump of coal!

Buy the book

Are online sales down this year, or below expectations? If not, then why am I getting e-mail after e-mail, imploring me to buy more and more? And for myself?
On the 16th, I received the following from Amazon.ca:
"As someone who has shopped at Amazon.ca, you might like to know it's not too late to treat yourself to a little something to enjoy as you're recovering from the holidays.
"Maybe you got everything on your holiday list taken care of early, and it's time to relax with that mystery you've wanted to read or a few new DVDs."
But it's not just Amazon. I received a similar pitch from Dover, the publisher, yesterday!
The biggest gift-giving holiday of the year is about to happen and I'm supposed to buy *myself* stuff now? And to help me recover from the holidays that haven't happened yet? Or to reward myself for finishing my shopping and decorating and baking early? Are they nuts? As if anyone is going to have time to read a book between now and Christmas! Unless they're a recluse, shut-in, orphan, on welfare or on life support - and in all of those cases I'm sure a book or DVD is farthest from their minds.


P.S. The picture above is from San Francisco. I made a note of the building, but it's not to hand and I am just too swamped getting the house ready for my sister's* arrival to look it up. If you're really interested in knowing the building, e-mail me and I'll look it up for you... after Boxing Day.
*Not Marge, the sister whose Christmas present I read before mailing it to her. The visiting sister is Roxe, from Ottawa.

Rear window

The "picture" I posted of our snow the other day was pretty lame. This might make up for it.
I was working in my home office on Monday. It looks out on the back of the house and although I was concentrating on what I was writing, I became aware, in my peripheral vision, of a flying white lump of something. It was an across-the-lane neighbour shovelling her snow.
Well, it wasn't the neighbour — it was the snow she was shovelling.
When she was clearing the walkway between her house and the next-door one, she'd just heave each shovelful over the fence, and sometimes she'd achieve remarkable height.
This isn't the best example of that, but it's the best I could capture shooting through the window.
Today it rained and the temperature went above 0C. We still have lots of snow on the ground, but less than before.

Evidence...

... that a gargoyle has been doing his job.

If you've never been here...

... this (right) is what Toronto looks like. Today anyway.
Of course, it's also what most of southern and eastern Ontario look like today. I've lost track of the accumulation that Environment Canada has estimated for most of us. 25 cm? 40 cm?
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like sketches in a similar vein (only much more amusing) by Sparky Donatello.

WHITE CHRISTMAS TRVIA: I just discovered this week that Environment Canada actually has a definition of "White Christmas." If there's not at least 2 cm of snow on the ground by 7am on Christmas day, it ain't white. Saith the guvamint weather agency.

Christmasy but creepy?

This fellow and five of his brothers appear on the now-closed Village Theatre in Chicago. This whole figure—especially his tangle of musical instruments—has always struck me as Christmasy. I think he reminds me (without the instruments) of Marley after he's removed the bandage that keeps his jaws shut.
But he's sort of creepy too, which detracts a bit from his Christmasy aspects.

Canadian Women Artists History Initiative

We interrupt seasonal pictures for some relatively new news: the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, based in the Art History Department at Concordia University in Montreal, appears to have officially started.

It is a collaborative effort to bring resources and researchers together to build and build upon scholarship on women artists in Canada. Its focus is on the period before 1967, and includes Canadian women artists born before 1925 (1965 for those in architecture) and working across a broad range of media.

I learned about the plans for this effort when I interviewed Dr. Janice Anderson (PhD), curator of visual resources in Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts, in June, but I just happened upon the group's Web site yesterday. I interviewed Janice in connection with the biography I'm writing of Toronto sculptor Merle Foster (1897-1986). The picture above is a figure from a fountain she sculpted.