There goes the neighbourhood (part 5)

What a difference three weeks makes! I predict that these houses will be finished by May, occupied in June and resold in July, demolished in August and construction of FIVE new houses on this very site will begin in January 2009.

I'm back

To my many fans around the world (most are courtesy of Sparky Donatello at crackskullbob.squarespace.com ), I am sorry for the quietude on this blog for the last 10 days or more. I have been away, covering a conference in Phillydelphia for my day job. I promise, however, to bring you, in the coming days, an update on the house at the end of the street, thoughts on the renaming of the New York Public Library and, best of all, pictures of some of the disappearing gargoyles of Philadelphia.

Just not tonight. But this weekend. I shit you not.

Cry, baby

I haven't seen it for a while, so it may be gone — to which I say, "Good riddance!"
It's the TV commercial for Kleenex, in which viewers (and various apparently willing participants in said commercial) are urged to "let it out" — their feelings, that is — to a "good listener" who has carted a blue couch and a box of Kleenex around the U.S. (to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Nashville and Las Vegas — even Salt Lake City!) to get people to release their bottled-up sadness and snuffle into a Kleenex.
They've even trademarked the phrase "let it out."
You can read all about it at the Let It Out Web site.
I probably wouldn't have noticed the commercial, except for two things:
1. I'm disinclined to sit on an upholstered couch outdoors, even if it's covered in 12 layers of Kleenex.
2. I'm not sure it's always appropriate to offer someone a Kleenex when they're teary.

I wrote an article about this for my day job, citing a passage from a novel I'd read. I wrote thusly:

"In Internal Affairs, a novel by the late British journalist Jill Tweedie, a client begins to cry during a session with Charlotte, a family planning counsellor.
"Charlotte, Tweedie wrote, 'suppressed the usual urge to offer the box of tissues.'
"Sounds almost cruel, doesn't it? This is a work of fiction, but let's hear Charlotte/Tweedie out: 'At her two weeks of training in counselling techniques the teacher had dwelt at some length on the dynamics of the tissue box, emphasizing that to give tissues to distressed clients amounted to an unspoken command from the counsellor to cease crying and would be interpreted by said client to mean that tears were unacceptable, that emotion itself was unacceptable.' "

I then consulted various experts on empathic etiquette and the "dynamics of the tissue box."

The corker is, when I approached Kimberly-Clark, the makers of Kleenex, for a comment, their spokeswoman declined!
I shit you not!
Of course, I wrote this piece back in the Dark Ages - in April of 2000, to be precise - so either Kimberly-Clark has come around to having a position or it's just found another way to flog Kleenex.

It's one that caught the attention of Greenpeace which infiltrated some of the commercial tapings, accusing the Kimberly-Clark of using depleting old growth forests to make its products.

There goes the neighbourhood (part 4)

Somehow, in this very cold, very snowy winter, the foundations have been laid and the framing has begun in earnest for the three houses that are going to replace what used to be a single, large house on the corner of Woburn and Jedburgh here in North Toronto.
Here's the framing from the Jedburgh side:

I guess the framers got a little peeved with me shooting so much, so one of them pulled out his cell phone and started taking pictures of me. I smiled and waved.

Happy Leapfrog Day!

I know I've already used this picture, but it's the 29th of February. That makes today, in this Year of the Frog, Leapfrog Day, and so I'm rerunning the picture, dammit. Besides, it's been too damned cold to take any new pictures and I wanted to give you a break from my radio sketches.

Radio days

I confess: I've been playing fast and loose with the facts. That Nordmende radio in the last post? It's not mine. I don't own it. It's in Roxe's basement in Ottawa.
This little yellow radio, however, is indeed mine. Although I put one in Roxe's Christmas stocking many years ago. Gave one to Marge too but she could never get any reception in her old office at Virginia Tech. (Well, duh, Marge!) She was just going to leave it behind when she packed up her VT office before she moved west to the land of aspiring writers in Iowa City, but I grabbed it. So this might IN TRUTH be Marge's ex-radio but it's mine now.
It's one of many radios, portable and otherwise, I own. (You can't have too many radios.) If I start to run out of material to post, I might just inflict my full portfolio of radio sketches on you.

Bye bye, BBC World Service

So now BBC World Service has shut down its shortwave service to Europe and north Africa. The end of an era. I wonder when they'll cut off the remaining 100 million shortwave listeners in the rest of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
The story in the Guardian quoted Simon Spanswick, the chief executive of the Association for International Broadcasting, as saying, "Everybody now has to use different ways to engage listeners. Nobody in the developed world listens on noisy, crackly shortwave anymore."
Oh yeah? I do.
BBC World Service transmissions to North America ended some time ago. Now apparently Europe has been deemed a "highly developed marketplace" in which listeners can access the BBC in "a variety of ways, including FM, satellite and online," the Guardian story said.
In addition to this old Nordmende (that needs a tube replaced), I have a small collection of portable shortwave radios. It's not always convenient to fire up the ol' laptop and dial up the CBC or BBC. I've used my little shortwaves to try to pull in a broadcast from Radio Canada International when I've been away from home, or to find the BBC World Service when I've wanted to hear an English-language newscast. It just isn't the same, at the end of a hard day of sightseeing or travelling, to curl up with a laptop under the covers and listen to the radio. I don't always travel with a laptop anyway.
Radio should be listened to on the radio, dammit.