Toronto Pride, Friday night: Foxhole

Tonight's destination is the Gladstone Hotel for Foxhole, a gay mixer put on by Shane Mackinnon.

Dramatic Chipmunk

This little gem goes out to Constance and her mother. Seems right up their alley.


(Via BoingBoing)

BBC NEWS | Americas | Bush vetoes stem cell funds bill

Bush vetoes stem cell funds bill

Dorian's friend Delia

Early in the year, I met Dorian Douma at Salem's Loft while visiting Toti. A bunch of us were sitting around a coffee table enjoying eachothers' company and conversation. The night turned out well. When I left to bike home in the wee hours of the morning, the guys were still upstairs, the Flamenco guitarists mashing with Dorian's drum machine.

Dorian, it turns out, is a very talented sound maker. If you enjoy electronic music and experimentation, click over to his project page, A Great White Bird; there you'll find a few mp3s of his pieces and other information. Or, you can listen to Dorian Douma's "My Friend Delia," below.

Here's some of what you'll find on his bio page:

A Great White Bird is one of the musical projects of Dorian Douma. Dorian grew up in the Yukon and moved to Victoria BC in 1991. He started making electronic music after hearing Radiohead's Kid A.

The A Great White Bird "sound," though singular and specific to the project, obviates Dorian's affection for the ephemera of 60s and 70s documentaries, lo-fi indie rock, the post-rock energy of American bands like Trans Am and Tortoise and European groups like Boards of Canada, Autechre, Radiohead, Broadcast and Stereolab.

I look forward to hearing more of his work, hopefully soon.

Owned

While waiting to hear back from Dan on whether or not I can post the NoReason strip here, I'll share something: Simply put, you are currently reading the blog of someone who will now live on forever, immortalized by the eye roll-inducing, yet admittedly quite funny panels of the latest NoReason comic strip.

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Inspired by a true story...

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And the punchline...

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My friends are neat.

Throw in

Throw in
Originally uploaded by Kyra Savolainen

Spent the evening in Mississauga yesterday, watching Constance play soccer.

I jump

Arieh and I spent the morning at the Badlands today. We had a blast and shot a bunch of photos. You can check them out on Arieh's blog (http://ariehsinger.com) or at my flickr (see sidebar).

An interest in fair taxation

My father was reared in Toronto, but he did much of his growing up in Muskoka. When he and his two brothers were boys, his father would drive my grandmother and the children up to Little Lake Joseph near Port Carling where the three would pass the season. My grandfather would return after each week employed as a metal worker in the City to rejoin the family at the Lake.

Over the five decades on Little Lake Jo, the Savolainen family became part of a close-knit community of locals and seasonal residents from the region and beyond. Gary, my dad, kept fond memories of barefooted tree tag and helping to introduce Ontario to barefoot waterskiing as a youth. My eldest uncle, Carl, even ended up meeting and marrying a lady named Elizabeth, whose family lived nearby. Shelved near me now are ancient reels of film on which my grandmother and her lady friends smoke and smile at the camera from a bygone era of elegant, lakeside glamour.

I'm told again and again by some that buildings are just things and that they aren't the essentially important things in life. But there is much history and family heritage shrouding such land and edifices as a family cottage in Ontario.

My father and eldest uncle eventually inherited their parents' cottage. I don't know if the two discussed in much detail what their long term plan would be for the property. By that time, Carl and his wife had their own home down the lake, and I can only really imagine now that my father agreed to forgo his own to visit my mothers' family's (septic- and hot-water tank equipped) cottage near Kinmount.

In the three years before his passing in 2005, my father's efforts to revive the Savolainen cottage as a place for a third generation to grow up were reinvigorated. Many of his hours were spent burning and bundling off to the dump years of brush and detritus. We had talks about putting hot water and fixing it up together, making it into a rental in order to keep it in the family. But my father's illness was diagnosed late and his time ran out quickly.

It was a great shame to me, then, that less than one year after Gary's passing, the sale of the family's place on the Lake was insisted upon. Carl had his own waterfront taxes to worry about, as outlined in this quotation from the Canadian Home Builder's Association website:

As an example of the impact of the growing tax burden, Carl Savolainen, a retired police officer, told The Toronto Star that his tax bill last year was $7,000, more than double the rate for his principal residence in Oshawa.

He and his wife worry that their children and grandchildren won’t be able to enjoy the modest cottage, built by his wife’s grandfather in 1924. Mr. Savolainen drives a school bus to help pay the taxes. (Full text in .pdf here.)

My mother, unable to afford the growing taxes and never having had anything kind to say about her husband's family's land, agreed to the sale.

And so the cottage sold to a pair of Toronto lawyers who could afford the skyrocketing taxes and will most likely contribute to even higher ones as they redevelop the property, destructing the humble bit of old Ontario.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, or are just interested, consider visiting Waterfront Ratepayers After Fair Taxation (a coalition of associations from across the province).

On the Cottage Life site, you'll find this extensive article on Ontario's cottage taxation problems.

What's observation got to, got to do with it?

Most spine tingling question I've been reminded of in a long time - 'what does the observer have to do with any of this?'

If the double slit experiment of quantum physics is something to which you'd like a very clear, friendly introduction, check out the interesting video below.

Introducing the River House

This spring, my mother purchased a tin-roofed house on the Moira River, near Tweed, Ontario.

Currently, we're both working to clean it up and clear it out. (The previous owner left behind three years worth of cigarette stench for us to contend with.)
The wall-to-wall carpeting has been ripped out. The next major step in Operation Destinkify is painting.

kslog's archives now one year longer!

You'll find that kslog's archive now dates back to 2003. The added posts come from my previous blog, aotp, which can still be found here.

How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons