test blog #10

Celebrate #EmpathyDay with a good book. Last year, a prosecutor in the US state of Virginia asked a judge to hand down an unusual sentence. Five teens had defaced a historic structure -- a Jim Crow-era schoolhouse for African-American children -- with swastikas and other racist graffiti. The judge agreed with the prosecutor -- and she sentenced the teens to reading . The teens were to choose books from a list of books that illuminate bigotry and hatred, among them Elie Wiesel's Night , Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , and Arthur Miller's The Crucible . Sentenced to read With at least one of those teens, it worked. This person (not identified), who is 16 or 17 years old, agreed to share his reading list and his thoughts with a reporter for The New York Times . The list included The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle, and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The books he found most affecting w...

With apologies to my man C. Dickens, it was the worst of customers, it was the best of customers. Our Children's Department is short-staffed right now, and although that is stressful in many ways, there is a silver lining for me: I am needed more on the information desk, and that's my favourite place to be in the library. One day this week, I experienced a real study in contrasts. From the desk, I looked over at the "activity centre" -- an educational-play area for parents and children -- and saw something sail through the air! It was a plastic play-thing of some sort and its arc was unmistakably thrown . As I started walking over, a parent intercepted me. He was holding the base of a small puzzle -- a square piece of wood -- and said, "This child is throwing things. He hit my child with this. I spoke to the father, and he said, 'They are children. That's what children do!'". I thanked him for letting me know and said I would take care of it. I c...

We used to eat President's Choice Blue Menu granola. The vanilla-almond flavour was crunchy, delicious, and reasonably healthy. My favourite way to eat it was with plain Greek yogurt and fruit, but it was very good with milk or rice milk as well. Then... it changed. It was no longer crunchy. It was no longer tasty. With a little liquid added, it tasted like soggy cardboard, or what I imagine soggy cardboard would taste like if it were a breakfast cereal. Thanks a lot, Loblaws. Allan, who does our food shopping, went on the hunt for a cereal that would satisfy all the requirements: whole grain, crunchy, tasty, not overly sweet, and reasonably healthy. Plus I prefer clusters to flakes. It would also be good if the cereal didn't cost $10.00 a box. This is how I discovered Jordan's Morning Crisp granola, and it has made me very happy. Morning Crisp is crunchy. Morning Crisp is delicious. Morning Crisp comes in a variety of yummy flavours: Wild About Berries, Simply Strawberry, ...

These days, most hotel rooms contain some sort of green messaging, as companies are expected to show how eco-friendly they are. Usually guests have the option of not having their towels changed daily, which is supposed to yield big energy savings. Last week at the Sheraton Parkway in Toronto, I learned that Sheraton's green policy is not exactly as advertised. I don't know if this qualifies as greenwashing, but it is certainly not full disclosure. The card reads: Conserving water, energy and other resources is rewarding for you and great for the environment. Enjoy a $5 voucher at participating food and beverage outlets or 500 Starpoints® awarded at check-out for each night you decline housekeeping (except day of departure). It feels good to conserve. To participate in the Make a Green Choice program, please tell us at check-in or look for the door hanger in your guestroom. It may feel good to conserve, but your conservation doesn't feel good to hotel workers. For each gues...

I am very frustrated by progressive reaction to Doug Ford becoming the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party. People are acting as if Ford has already won an election that is three months away. I understand there is great -- and well-deserved -- anger against Kathleen Wynne's Liberal party. But are we progressives going to stand helplessly staring at polls as we are thrown from frying pan to fire? Under 20 years of Liberal governments, public spending has been frozen, resulting in a decrease of more than 40% in public resources. Corporate taxes are at all-time low. Privatization is strangling both services and jobs. And now -- supposedly -- we're all going to vote for more of the same. Either literally more of the same in the Liberals or worse than that in the Conservatives. And supposedly, we won't vote NDP because the NDP can't win. We won't vote for a party because the party can't win because not enough people will vote for it. How stupid do yo...

In my continuing (and usually failing) goal of remembering to write about things here , instead of just posting to Facebook, I feel I should write something about the student organizing and activism around gun violence in the US. This movement is the greatest thing to happen in the US in as long as I can remember. It stands with the Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter as the most important movements of our present time. It has all the hallmarks of a true grassroots revolution. - It is self-organized. - Its spokespeople emerged organically. - It built quickly, because it has tapped into longstanding anger, and it resonates both deeply and broadly. - It is building on a local level to effect broad social change. - It is being organized from the bottom up, as opposed to, for example, the organizing around the election of Barack Obama. - It is using a variety of tools, and it appears to be fluid and agile around using different approaches as needed: walk-outs, public speaking, mainstre...

I recently attended the CUPE Ontario Library Workers Conference, which has become a highlight of my year since I first attended (and was elected to the organizing committee) in 2015. It has eclipsed and replaced the OLA Superconference as the most relevant and enjoyable must-attend conference in my schedule. When I first got my librarian degree, I was very excited about attending my first "OLA" (as it's always called). But I quickly learned that the sessions are a crap-shoot, sometimes relevant but often obvious and dull. There's also a great deal of boosterism by OLA and the member libraries. For the difference between the two conferences, for OLA, think employers and libraries , for CUPE Ontario, think  labour and library workers . In recent years, our Library Workers Conference has focused on precarious work and health and safety issues, two themes that are inextricably linked. This year's conference was called "Sex, Drugs & Bed Bugs," a light ...