One Love
Stanchions
Tower Power
My New Friend, Tracey Barista
Quick Sew
Whole Lotta Vines (1-2)
My Wife Told Me What Kind Of Flower This Is But I Have Already Forgotten, Some Things Stick and Others Don’t I Guess
Category: Life in general
Franklin “Flip” Flanagan, last of the boxing lineage the Fightin’ Fencepost Flanagans.
Holiday hangover
As a Queen’s employee I am contractually obliged to point out tricolour when I see it occurring naturally, sorry
Sinister Door
Lawn Lion
My New Pal, Spiff Tenderloin. Fun fact: I know all cats’ true names upon meeting them or shortly after. Whatever this cat’s human thinks it is named… it is Spiff Tenderloin.
Hangin’ shoes. I don’t know why I photograph these.
Rock Climbing Tree
Hidden Sculpture
Sidewalk Snail
They Say Some Of These Little Libraries Are Kind Of Right-Leaning But I Don’t Know If I Buy It
Dead tree / haunted lantern
Flamed Sign
Red Gate
Window Saint
Nice Doors
Dawn at the New Garden
Inspiring Poem / Your A Goof
Tree Hats
Pretty Flowers
Minimalist Missing Cat
Jesus Can’t You Just Let These Children Play Without Belittling Their Intelligence (Parts 1 and 2)
Brick Christ
Rainy Statuary
Little House on the Lawn
Dutch Zombie Children Welcome You
Free Books, Free Ants
A Little Park But Wait It’s Not For You, Poor Person
Contrasting Footpaths
Cool-Ass Little Seed Library
This took a long time to do! And I suspect will take a bit of effort to maintain over time.
The biggest issue being to create the table with icons, it wound up being necessary to pull the table out as HTML, manually insert the Font-Awesome icon codes, and then update the table manually every time I wanted to add a line with the icons.
Compounded by the fact that I’m an idiot, and thought that doing a find-and-replace at the code level for “Street,” St.,” etc. to “St,” and “Road,” “Rd.”, etc. as “Rd” was a good idea. But I had RegEx turned on, so when I replaced “St.” and Rd.” every string with St* and with Rd* was replaced, including the word “Kingston,” strings like “Bistro,” and so on — including their URLs. But by the time I noticed it was too late to undo. So half my time on the table was spent fixing those mistakes.
Ultimately, I’d prefer to live in a world where chain restaurants are rare, Facebook is extinct, and people curate local information without being reliant on algorithm driven search. I use Google Sheets and Google MyMaps for this, so I’m not angling to make this some sort of weird purity test — but I’m hoping to use those tools to make people less reliant on Google’s primary product, and do a small bit to eradicate Facebook/Meta.
So Back in the Day I lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec, which has a better-than-you’d-expect art gallery, the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke. A converted really huge three-story mansion.
There was a touring exhibit of impressionist painters that was hitting all the big Canadian galleries that year. You got your Monets, you got your Van Goghs, like one or two lesser paintings from a bunch of the big names. And for some reason, it gets a week at MBAS as well as all the bigger-city galleries. This didn’t get a ton of fanfare: an article in the local French papers and in the sole local English paper.
This is partly because MBAS building would be really big for a house, but it was pretty small for a gallery. I don’t think they had a budget for marketing or promotion at all. The total staff count in there at any point would usually be two people: somebody at the front desk / coat check who would also dash over if somebody was in the tiny gift shop, and a wandering security person.
So this travelling exhibition is up on the third floor of MBAS, and as a frequent visitor, I know a few things:
- You just walk into the gallery. It costs I think $5 as a suggested donation. Nobody checks your ID or anything.
- The fire escape, which you can access through a normal screen door leading to a small balcony from the always-open third-floor break room, is a set of stairs running right down to beside the gallery. It is always unlocked and unalarmed. I’ve seen enough people ducking out there for a smoke over time that I’m aware of that.
- There’s one security person; on the day I drop by to see the Impressionists, it’s a women in I’d guess her 70s. They walk every floor, very slowly, so once they leave the third floor to walk downstairs and start over at the first, you’ve got probably a 20-minute window before they get back to the third floor.
Faced with the Impressionists, I also realize:
- They’ve just, like, hung the paintings. Like you or I would. They don’t seem to be super affixed to the walls with some sort of weird backing systems, they aren’t locked or behind glass. They’re just there, wire on a nail style.
- There are, at least to my ability to see them, no security cameras or anything. I’d never really cared to look before, but I’m suddenly motivated by the realization that
- I can totally steal a fucking Van Gogh.
Spoiler: I didn’t. But man, I thought real hard about it. Not to keep, but just, you know, take it down, wander down the fire escape, loop the block and drop it back off. Or take it home for the night and drop it off in the morning.
Do I regret not stealing a Van Gogh? Hell yeah. I wish to this day I’d nutted up and temporarily stolen a Van Gogh. Maybe I was missing something and an alarm would have gone off and I would have been charged with attempted theft of a Van Gogh, but if you’re gonna crime, what a crime to crime.
And maybe I wasn’t missing something! Maybe I could have 100% stolen a Van Gogh. And for the rest of my life been dining out on The Time I Stole the Van Gogh.
But I didn’t. So instead all I have is The Time I Could Have Stolen A Van Gogh And Didn’t. Which is what you’re getting here.
Sorry.
Categories
Welcome to Pontypool
The sporadically-updating horror podcast Tear Them Apart did an episode on one of the great sleeper horror movies of all time, Pontypool, last month.
Horror fans that don’t know much about south-eastern Ontario likely don’t know that Pontypool is a real place — in fact, I went to high school one town over, and spent a fair bit of time in Caesarea and Nestleton with friends, a short hop away.
Caesarea is even name-checked in the movie, and is the title of the third of a three-book trilogy by the author of the novel that Pontypool the movie was adapted from.
Visiting my folks last weekend, I thought I’d swing by the town to take some pictures for Evan Dorkin and Paul M Yellovich, the podcast’s hosts.
The Pontypool sign, with a quick best-efforts “Tear Them Apart” podcast call-out. I took it down after. I was really angering all the goats in the weird-ass half-farm next to the sign so I had to make it quick.
“Downtown” Pontypool, facing north. Note the telephone pole “TAKE BACK CANADA” sign. People think Ontario / Canada is pretty progressive, but it’s more like New York State: once you’re out of the cities, you’ll find a lot of the same regressive racist yahoos you find in any rural place. This was the part of the drive to my folks’ place where farms have STAY OFF MY LAND GUBBERMINT signs, and vaccine conspiracy lawn signs sprouted like weeds during COVID.
Grant Mazzy would probably be more at home here as a shock jock than the station staff would like to believe.
Same position, turning south:
That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-19th-century vintage.
The sign on the left of this photo is for the town’s only gas station (with integrated Tim Horton’s naturally; there’s nothing more faux Canadian than this foreign-owned chain that’s somehow convinced people it’s a Canadian icon, and that its coffee doesn’t taste like battery acid that briefly had a coffee bean dipped in it).
Tim Horton’s has grown in my mind in recent years to really represent the rise of the right in Canada: symbols are more important than reality, and being “Canadian” is more important than being Canadian. It’s not a Canadian chain any more, and the coffee and food are terrible, but it’s “Canadian,” so Doug Ford shills for Smile cookies and — okay, I’m getting off-topic. Tim Hortons sucks.
Behind the grocery store across the street you can see a little red sign; that’s the pharmacy on the first floor of a house. Facing the pharmacy, the only grocery/convenience store, and the only restaurant:
That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-20th-century vintage.
Not pictured is the town arena, which if you live in Ontario and I say “small town arena,” you’re already picturing.
The most unrealistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is that it has a radio station that employs at least three people full-time. The most realistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is the syndicated news break at the beginning that mentions a major drug bust in Caesarea. That 100% checks out.
The above probably sounds like I’m dunking on Pontypool; I kind of am, because I’m a bit triggered by the TAKE BACK CANADA garbage and have less than fond memories of COVID-area rural lunacy.
I grew up in a town about this size, and I’m sure it’s as much a mixed bag as that town was.
Anyway, that’s Pontypool-the-town, if anyone is watching the movie (it’s really, really good!) and wants to see what the real-deal place looks like.
Categories
Big Changes; Swift Action
Lots going on in my life these days; most folks who know me know this, but my last day at Smith Engineering was February 9, 2024. This also represents a step away from higher education marketing career-wise; big news coming, but not until March.
“Coming down” from a job you’ve put a lot of your brain and identity into for years is a process. I was fortunate to be asked by friends of friends to house-sit / dog-sit for this very good, very silly boy for a week:
…which gave me a week of decompressing, partly getting ready for the Next Thing, lots of dog-walking, etc.
I’ve never really listened to Taylor Swift, but both of my nieces are bananas for her. Big Swifties. And there’s nothing wrong with that! I just run my own music server / support soma.fm, so my listening doesn’t generally include stuff I don’t intend it to. And while I’m trying to be less snobbish than I used to be, the culture around Swift wasn’t one where I felt compelled to seek it out and listen to her music.
But — time on my hands, and looking to reset my brain in some significant ways — I challenged my nieces that if they would make me playlists of up to 15 songs, I would give them an earnest listen.
And they did (their mom said it was “the hardest she’d ever seen them work on something like homework”). So I did!
I’m a big fan of my reMarkable, so I used it to write while I gave these songs a Whole Listen. I have no idea why anyone would be interested in these, but my wife suggested I post them for posterity, so if you’re looking for a 50-year-old man’s perspective on lists of Taylor Swift songs compiled by two teens, here y’go:
I can’t say I’d be lining up for tickets (especially at these prices), but I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. And that it’s a lot more maudlin than I expected! I was thinking it was all pop bangers — “Look What You Made Me Do” is the only Taylor Swift song I can summon to memory — but there’s a whole subcategory of Swift songs I now call the “piano sads”.
Really impressed with the songwriting, the lyrics. Would be more enthused if she seemed to have any way of positioning herself and her life other than the present state of whatever relationship she’s in (but maybe, again, this is just a reflection of where my nieces are at in their song choices).
I’ve also been thinking a bit about why I’ve been so out of the Swift orbit; the fair question for myself, I think, is to ask why I’ve been quasi-avoiding this very popular, very successful female singer/songwriter, and would I duck out on male pop stars the same way?
And… having given it some thought, I feel okay. I can think of a number of Very Big acts that I’ve also never really made time for, across a number of spectrums, so I don’t think there’s anything there. But it’s good to ask yourself periodically where the “I’m not interested in what this person has to say” instinct comes from. In this case I think it’s just the form, and if I’m honest a bit of New Country stink in the background, that drove the disinterest.
On the whole, a really worthwhile exercise. I feel like I have a better understanding of a big piece of the zeitgeist right now.
My wife and I try to attend the Union Gallery’s annual fundraiser every year. It’s called Cézanne’s Closet; the format is you pay $100 for a ticket, and about 100 artists donate work to the gallery. You browse before the event, and then ticket numbers get called at random. If your number comes up, you pick a piece of art to keep!
It’s a ton of fun, especially as a couple — there’s always an interesting evaluation-and-negotiation phase to hit on pieces we both love.
This year, though, our #1 was identical when we compared notes: Wrong Turn at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, by artist Darby Huk.
We were chuffed! Darby’s a Master’s student at Queen’s University, and we could hear her on the Zoom call for the gallery event, so I knew she was in town.
Unbeknownst to Marisa, I reached out to her after the event and asked if she’d be interested in a commission of two more paintings to make it a trio of sorts (I don’t think this is technically a triptych, but I’m calling it that anyway), keeping with the “cryptids and vices” theme. Fortunately, she was into it! So we bought two more paintings from her…
¡Cumpleaños! Puerto Rico
Girls Night, Douglas, Wyoming
Together, they look like this…
Again, we’re super stoked! Now we just have to figure out where we can clear some wall space…