test blog #10

From time to time, I sell things on Craigslist and Kijiji. I've given away scads of things on Freecycle, including, when we were packing up to move to Canada, a huge air conditioner, bedroom furniture, a couch, and other items considered gems by Freecyclers. But right now money is tight and I'm not feeling as generous, so I go the Craigslist/Kijiji route. I get rid of stuff we don't need, someone gets a good deal, and I get a little extra cash. Everyone wins. Bargaining sucks My constant irritant is The Bargainers. I dislike bargaining and I don't want to do it. I include the phrase "price is firm" in my ad, but that doesn't stop the Bargainers. Some are polite: "Would you accept $40?". Many are downright demanding: "I will pay $30. Give me your phone number.". I don't care. The more they insist, the less I want to play the game. The whole concept of bargaining runs counter to my preference for direct communication. First, state a f...

Annika Tabovaradan is an awesome force in the world. She is a girl willing to overcome her fears to defend her rights and the rights of others, a girl who sees herself as part of a community, who understands that we all depend on each other. Down the road, when she stops saying "I hate public speaking" and "I"m not making much sense," she's also going to be an awesome public speaker. Story: Wild Applause for teen's 2 a.m. speech for libraries

In case you haven't already, you can send Jack Layton your good wishes .

Quite possibly the world's cutest puppy.

Last Monday, the Federal Court of Canada released a decision reaffirming there is evidence that war resisters are targets of punishment because of their political beliefs if forced to return to the United States. The judgment in the judicial review of US war resister and veteran Chris Vassey's case found the Immigration and Refugee Board's "lack of analysis of the evidence before it concerning the independence and impartiality of the US court-martial system, as well as the lack of reasons for preferring contrary evidence to that of the applicant to be unreasonable." This is the tenth Federal Court or Federal Court of Appeal decision since 2008 in favour of US war resisters who are seeking permanent resident status in Canada. It is also the eighth Federal Court decision to recognize that war resisters are singled out for more severe punishment because they have expressed objections to war. In his July 18 decision concerning Chris Vassey, The Honourable André F.J. Scot...

By now you've probably heard that the City of Toronto public budget hearings continued through the night and into the morning, making this the longest City Council meeting in the city's history. The Star reports: Some 168 people took Mayor Rob Ford up on his invitation to tell him what they think of the suggestions. It was the kind of meeting where, at 4:30 a.m. in a city hall surrounded by hushed streets, a 14-year-old girl sobbed as she told the mayor how much she loves her local library. Between 9:30 a.m. Thursday and 6:30 a.m. Friday, only two speakers endorsed any kind of cutting. The rest alternately criticized, mocked, pleaded with and reasoned with a placid Ford, who acknowledged the comments of only a few before the meeting finally ended at 8:55 a.m. Friday — 22 hours and 25 minutes after it began. Although this story contains plenty of cynicism about the process and fatalism about the results, there is reason for hope. From Maureen Reilly, President of the Toronto P...

Impudent Strumpet: If home is too crowded or noisy or uncomfortable or abusive or non-existent, having somewhere else to go - a perfectly respectable place to go and to be (compare the connotations of spending hours in the library vs. spending hours in the bar) - can be a lifesaver. And once you're there, it's full of tools for educating and improving yourself or, worst case, quietly amusing yourself. This quality, this truly public oasis, explains a fair portion of my love for libraries. Read: The other other awesome thing about libraries .

Excellent analysis from Torontoist: It is far too soon to tell whether the long, dense sequence of anger-inspiring comments, falsehoods, and dubious policy decisions Rob and Doug Ford have been responsible for this month will represent, in retrospect, some sort of tipping point in this administration. What is certain is that across Toronto, a rapid-fire sequence of decisions and proclamations is causing an upsurge of anger among many residents. Like all mayoralties, Ford's is complex. There are many entry points to analysis and a great many questions to which we do not yet know the answers. (Does Ford think that a raft of budget cuts will genuinely make Toronto a better city, for instance, or does he not care about greatness so long as things cost less?) But as the torrent of articles, quotable quotes, and op/eds builds, one theme has been emerging more clearly of late: anger is all well and good, but will it change anything? The Brothers Ford may offend our sensibilities, but col...

Doug Ford: "Why do we need another little library in the middle of nowhere that no one uses?" Library users: "We want our votes back." The Star is devoting some serious real estate to Fords vs. TPL. I happened to see a hard copy (at the library!) today, and was very pleased to see such a strong defence of TPL - and Margaret Atwood - on the front page of the GTA section. Fadumo Elmi had a message for Doug Ford Tuesday night. “I gave him my vote,” she said sternly outside Northern Elms. “If he closes the library, I want back my vote.” If Ford's comments raised eyebrows at City Hall, they raised blood pressure among patrons of this supposedly disposable library. Statistics from the Toronto Public Library show that usage is rising at the branch, with 15 per cent more checkouts in June 2011 compared to last year. “My blood is boiling,” said Beverly Pringle, a resident of the ward since 1984. “As you can see, (the library) is really rather important to me,” she sai...

I passed the page test ! I think it was a bit easier than I was led to believe. On the phone, I was told the test had to be completed in six minutes. But before the actual test, I was told I had "up to 10 minutes," with points deducted for time over six minutes. When I finished, I said, "If I'm under six minutes, I'd like to double-check my work." The reply: "You're not under." Oh shit! But two people checked the books, and informed me that I passed. Whew! It will be a while until I'm actually hired and start work, but what felt like a huge hurdle is behind me.

As I hope you know, accused WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth and is now reportedly being treated like other prisoners, no longer singled out for various tortures and degradations. This improvement was the direct result of international activism on Manning's behalf. For Manning's supporters, the immediate goal is now a public accounting for the illegal and inhumane conditions he endured while being held at Quantico. The United Nations is investigating the matter, but US officials are denying their reasonable request to meet with Bradley without monitors. Juan Mendez, the UN's top official on torture, has requested unmonitored meetings with Bradley. Mr. Mendez wants to insure that international protocol for prisoner treatment and justice are followed. The Bradley Manning Support Network is asking us to phone the White House and the Secretary of the Army, and ask them to comply with the UN's request. (You can read the UN statemen...

When Toronto City Council’s executive committee meets on Thursday to start making decisions about the future of the Toronto Public Library, you can help defend Toronto Public Library. And if you can't make it, you can surely make a phone call. The committee’s first item of business is the infamous KPMG report recommending branch closures, reduced hours, cuts to programs - and privatization. Anyone can get on a speakers list to make a five minute statement about why the Toronto Public Library is important. Just send an email to exc@toronto.ca to request an opportunity to speak. For more information about the meeting, go here . Rob Ford said he wants to hear from all Torontonians. On CTV last week, he said: I still return every call that comes in. Anyone who wants to call me, they can call 416-397-3673. Let's take him up on it. Call 416.397.3673 and leave a message about how important the Toronto Public Library is. (Please be nice.) So, if you value the Toronto Public Library, ...

I've re-started reading Moby Duck . I don't know if this ever happens to you, but sometimes if I pick up a book at a particularly busy time when I don't have enough uninterrupted time and concentration, I end up reading in tiny dribs and drabs, a page here, two paragraphs here. It's very unsatisfying, not to mention difficult to remember who's who and what's what. So I'll wait for a quieter time and begin again from page one. That's what I've just done with Moby Duck . From my reading today, I want to share this passage with you, a bit of elaboration on a comment deang made when I wrote about Moby Duck last week. "There's nothing new around," he said. Take Osiris. Even today, when the Nile floods, flotsam follows that same route. Not even pollution is new. He told me to think of volcanic eruptions, of the tons of pumice and toxic ash an eruption throws into the sea. No, when you studied the history of flotsam long enough you realized ...

Today in New York City, some families will celebrate their love and commitment, because the law has finally caught up with reality. 2 Dads, 2 Daughters, 1 Big Day by Frank Bruni Even in a city as diverse as New York and a neighborhood as progressive as the West Village, a little kid knows that having two dads is different. Eight-year-old Maeve certainly did. She knew, too, that the world didn’t see her family exactly the way it saw others. Her dads, Jonathan Mintz and John Feinblatt, could tell. “She understood that there was something, for lack of a better word, second-class about her family,” Mintz said. And, as she wrestled with that, her frustration was distilled in a question that she and then her sister, Georgia, 6, began to ask more and more often. Why aren’t you two married like our friends’ parents? For a long time Mintz and Feinblatt avoided an answer because, while they didn’t want to lie, they also didn’t want to focus their daughters’ attention on the blunt truth: that New...

Remember we like lists ?? It's been a long time! This list will answer the burning question: What's up? What's happening in your life? Doing anything interesting? Enjoying doing something mundane? Reading a good book? Working in your garden? Suffering from the heat? Tell us! Elaborate as much or little as you'd like. The only rule this time is a six-item limit. (Fewer than six is fine.) Here are six things going on in my life. 1. I'm done with " Private Eyes "!! Whoo-hoo! It was really crazy towards the end. Through a series of strangely predictable mishaps, I was left to write the final report on the surveillance portion of the project almost completely on my own. It was nerve-wracking but a great challenge. (There was also a portion about video analytics, which I was not involved with.) When I was hired, I said I was very clear that I was available for no more than 25 hours per week. During the final two weeks of this project, I worked almost 100 hour...

Regarding the horrific massacre in Norway, some people are apparently making statements like this: "If that had happened in Texas, the shooter would have lasted 30 seconds before dozens of regular folks with guns took him out." Texas has a rate of deaths by guns of about 11 per 100,000, which comes out to about 2,860 per year. [If my math is incorrect, by all means let me know.] Norway's rate of deaths by guns is 0.30 per 100,000, about 14 a year. If we factor in yesterday's massacre - clearly not the norm in Norway! - Norway's death-by-gun rate rises to 1.66 per 100,000. In other words, factoring in all the poor souls who lost their lives yesterday, Texas's gun death rate will exceed Norway's by almost seven times. You know how when people carry cell phones, they use cell phones? And if they don't have a cell phone on their person, they can't use one? Letting people run around with guns doesn't decrease gun violence. Humans don't work that...

These sexy buildings are right down the street from us. Allan and I both like them a lot, and have watched their progress in the Mississauga skyline with interest. Apparently many people have been doing the same. From the New York Times real estate pages: People looking for the latest in twisting, gravity-defying architecture might start with the international cities of the Middle East or China, but you wouldn’t expect them to look here, in the suburbs outside Toronto. But the first residents are moving into an extremely curvaceous, 56-story condominium tower in Mississauga, a city of about 738,000 people. The skyscraper, called the “Marilyn Monroe” by locals for its voluptuous curves, was the result of an international design competition initiated in 2005 by the tower’s development company, Fernbrook Cityzen. Now, joining London’s spiraling Gherkin building and New York’s rippling 8 Spruce Street is Mississauga’s buxom Absolute tower — or rather, two of them, both designed by the Chi...

James posted this in comments yesterday , but it deserves its own thread: Top Five Ford Lies . If you haven't seen it yet, please go read. Of course, politicians with a privatization agenda never let the facts get in the way of their profit-driven ideology. If they cared about facts, government services would never be privatized, since it's been proven time and again, the world over, that privatization is more expensive, less efficient and less accountable. Taxes don't decrease, but profits for a few increase. More on this another time, when I'm not on deadline. Meanwhile, in case you need a primer on this whole government-as-business thing, see Pogge: "Is he running a government, or making widgets?" And while you're there, on the related subject of government-spending-lies the media flogs whenever it's convenient: "Zombie lies" . Harper "spent his way out of recession". Yeah, right.

Toronto City Councillor Doug Ford thinks his city has more libraries than donut shops . In fact: When the Urban Affairs branch closes, Toronto will have 3.9 libraries per 100,000 people, which is what Vancouver has. Halifax has 4.3 libraries per 100,000 people, more than Toronto. In the U.S., the entire state of Vermont, which has only one-quarter of the population of Toronto, has 30 libraries per 100,000 people, which is 7-1/2 times the library density of Toronto. In Etobicoke (Mr. Ford's area), there are 13 library branches there, and 39 Tim Horton's shops, not to mention all the other donut shops. In fact, on a per capita basis, the people in Etobicoke have fewer libraries than Toronto as a whole. They have one for every 27,000 people whereas in Toronto as a whole it's about one for every 25,000 people. A new poll shows that Torontonians overwhelming oppose Ford's anti-library privatization agenda. Of course they do! Privatization benefits the few at the expense of ...

Further to my last post , how can we build a world without hate when the people in power are moving in the opposite direction? Last year I stumbled on a CPAC broadcast of hearings being held in the Canadian Senate. A former head of "corrections" (read: prisons) for the state of Texas was testifying about how supposed tough-on-crime sentencing doesn't work. He was not in Canada on any official capacity, but as an individual, formerly sold on the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key method, now speaking about how seemingly expensive social programs aimed at crime prevention are actually a bargain in the long run. The Harper Government's so-called anti-crime legislation has hot-button mass appeal. Underneath the rhetoric, however, it's just a boondoggle for the prison industry, creating more criminals to fill more prisons. How many young Canadian lives will be wasted for profit and ideology? As the US, UK and Australia step back from policies aimed at incarceratin...

In Texas, the survivor of a vicious hate crime is campaigning to spare the life of his assailant, who murdered two other people and is scheduled to be executed today. I collect these kinds of stories, and one day I'd like to write more about why I find them so incredibly powerful. But with my Friday deadline looming and much still to do, I will add this to the "blog about someday" list, and just pass this story to you. Rais Bhuiyan's website is here: World Without Hate . After reading this story below, I hope you will sign his petition to try to save Mark Stroman's life. Mark Anthony Stroman, 41, a stonecutter from Dallas, shot people he believed were Arabs, saying he was enraged by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He killed at least two: Vasudev Patel, an Indian immigrant who was Hindu, and Waqar Hasan, a Muslim born in Pakistan. A third shooting victim, Rais Bhuiyan, 37, a former Air Force pilot from Bangladesh, survived after Mr. Stroman shot him in t...

I've just started reading a remarkable book, one that can't wait until I finish to share it with you: Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,000 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn. I can think of no better way to represent this book than by sharing a portion of the prologue. At the outset, I felt no need to acquaint myself with the six degrees of freedom. I'd never heard of the Great North Pacific Garbage Patch. I liked my job and loved my wife and was inclined to agree with Emerson that travel is a fool's paradise. I just wanted to learn what had really happened, where the toys had drifted and why. I loved the part about containers falling off a ship, the part about the oceanographers tracking the castaways with the help of far-flung beachcombers. I especially loved the part about the rubber duckies crossing the Arctic, going cheerfully where explorers ha...

Mayor Rob Ford is out to privatize the living daylights out of Toronto. Privatization is a great deal for the corporations that pick up lucrative contracts, and a very bad deal for everyone else. As privatization grows, quality of life erodes. Next on Ford's agenda: the Toronto Public Library. With 99 branches and an estimated 17.5 million visitors each year, TPL is the largest library system in North America. In order to be a true public library, a system must have branches in every neighbourhood, a full range of information services that serve the needs of its communities, and be free of user fees . It must be staffed by professionals who know and care about libraries, and it must be focused on access to knowledge and information, not profit. Tell Rob Ford and the Toronto City Council that you want to keep the public in the Toronto Public Library: go here to send a letter, and please share widely.

This is probably the strongest truth-telling about Canada's experience in Afghanistan - and the revolting response to it at home - that I have seen in the mainstream media. Thank you, Thomas Walkom! On Tuesday, Canada officially ended its combat mission in Afghanistan. It should never have started. The war has been a dismal failure. . . . For Canada, the lessons of Afghanistan should be sobering. This ill-contrived adventure has cost the lives of 161 Canadians, including 157 soldiers. As well, at least 615 Canadian soldiers have been wounded in battle, many seriously. Politicians and media lavishly praise our troops for their bravery and professionalism. Yet, ironically, this has made it easier for the country to gloss over the fact that these sacrifices were largely pointless. Had our military been made up of draftees rather than volunteers, there would be more public anger. For taxpayers, the cost of the Afghan war so far is $11.3 billion and climbing. That figure excludes ongoi...

We've just returned from our consult with an orthopedic specialist at the OVC in Guelph. Tal has been doing so well, she seems so improved, that I think many people would have cancelled the appointment. But remembering the kind of pain she was in two weeks ago, and how long it took to go away, we felt there was probably something simmering - that rest was a relief, but not a cure. Plus it's not easy to get appointments at Guelph - this was on a cancellation - so we planned to go anyway. An excellent orthopedist examined Tala, then asked another doctor do the same for a second opinion. They believe the problem is not in her knee, but in her spine. The orthopedist explained a condition similar to sciatica in humans, in which a disc slips, then the body builds up fibrous tissue around the out-of-place disc, and that tissue presses on a nerve. In dogs, the affected nerve can either be the sciatic or femural nerves, so can present as lameness in one leg. It's known as cauda equi...

In addition to writing a large portion of the final report for the "Private Eyes" research project, I've been stressing over something else - something I decided not to share, until today. I finally have an interview for a page position at the Mississauga Library System, something for which I've waited for two years. I didn't want to tell anyone, because I was actually worried I might not pass! When I decided to make this career change, and decided that my first preference was to work in Mississauga, I learned that one way to get started was with a job as a library page - that is, shelving books. It's the bottom of the rung of the library ladder, but it would be a foot in the door - after a certain number of hours, I'd be able to join the union, and I'd have access to internal job postings. I'd also meet other library people, have another small but steady income source, and there'd be a flexible schedule that would work with school. That simpl...

Many good reasons to boycott tonight's Major League All Star Game: Arizona, The All-Star Game, And Speaking Up For Human Rights at Joy of Sox.

As we baseball fans say, we are "at the break". The All Star Break begins today: three days without real baseball, plus this year an extra day off for our Red Sox. Although the actual halfway point of the season came last week, the All Star Break is a time to assess teams' and players' performance in roughly half a season. Standings at The Break are often - although not always - an indicator of how teams will finish the year. And how are the Red Sox at the Break? They have won six straight games, 10 of their last 11. They are in first place in the extremely competitive American League East, with a one-game lead over the second-place New York Yankees and a six-game lead over the third-place Tampa Bay Rays. And by the way, they are Unstoppable. Four years ago, it was Inevitable . This year, it is Unstoppable. For the past two years, Allan and I have spent the Break in Stratford, Ontario, seeing plays and visiting with our friends Eric and Kelly of Across the Bridge B...

One hundred years ago, this week - July 7, 1911 , to be exact - an American man named Hiram Bingham found the ruins of an ancient ceremonial city, mostly overgrown with Peruvian jungle. Some indigenous families were living on the site, tending small subsistence farms. Despite the fact that local people had always known about the ruins, and despite the fact that the clues of other explorers and many indigenous people enabled his route, Bingham claimed to "discover" these ruins. Those ruins are now one of the world's most famous and most remarkable places: Machu Picchu. Over the next few years, Bingham would bring Machu Picchu to the attention of the larger world. He would uncover other nearby Incan ruins and open the ancient paths between them, now known as the Inca Trail . He would also violate an agreement he made with the Peruvian government, and illegally excavate, remove and steal ancient artifacts from those sites, including the remains of Incan people - the ancestor...