Starting next week, my friend Beth is trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by playing hockey with 19 other women for 10 days straight. I think they are a bit nuts but it is for a good cause, they are trying to raise money for research into Cystic Fibrosis.

As the game gets closer, she’s figuring out the details – today she calculated caloric expenditure for that much hockey and noted “I honestly don’t know how I’m going to fit 4,220 Calories worth of food inside my body every day!”

So friends, do you hate mucous overproduction? Love women playing hockey? Interested in helping someone get into the honest-to-goodness book of world records? You can HELP! Cheer them on. Send some money. Suggest food for Beth to keep up her energy.

Beth’s blog
The longest game for CF site

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The Morning Half-Life Blues

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.

Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

Marge Piercy

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This giant baby made by Ron Mueck has been my phone splash page for a while now. If you get a chance to visit the new addition to the family at the national gallery, I would encourage you to go and say hi and let her glare at you a while. While you’re there, check out Brian Jurgen’s “shapeshifter”, and Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) a wicked video of pyrotechnic Rube Goldberg devices.

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hey library lovers, I’m just home from an outing to Lillian Smith, and wanted to remind you that Toronto Public Library has updated their catalog, which means it’s time to update our library lookup bookmarklets.

To make a new one, visit Jon Udell’s Library Lookup Bookmarklet Generator, and indicate the base URL for the new catalog, http://catalogue.torontopubliclibrary.ca and choose the vendor, Sirsi (WebCat) from the list.

Voila! You have a handy tool to help you find books from online bookstores at your local public library!

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something I like about art is the way it communicates the universal nature of human experience through the ages. Like in this picture by Dieric Bouts, which clearly shows the pain and remorse of a hangover from the fifteenth century.

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inspired by a friend’s dreadful suffering at the hands of sinusitis, I’ve proposed an idea to the halfbakery, where the community decides which ideas are baked and which are not.

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Once there was a local literacy program. This place was a fun place to spend time – very welcoming and lots of nice people, kids and grandmothers, books, lots of collages and writing projects up on the walls, a geriatric photocopier and mismatched furniture.

Along with everything else, the literacy program had a bank of PCs along the back wall. A toad was sitting at a table back there, happily engrossed in some Aesop’s Fables when she heard a scream. One of the grandmothers was covering parts of the screen with her hands, looking away and grimacing. One of the kids, attracted by the excitement, exclaimed “I see a bum!” You know what that means – there had been a porno eruption on her computer!

The toad dashed over to help her fix it. They started fresh with firefox¹ and the toad headed back to reading the Tiger and the Brahmin. But lo and behold, what should appear but more bums, and other images of homo activities that were not very interesting or appealing to this particular grandmother. The toad rushed over, stunned that we still had a porno problem.

Then the toad noticed the URL. The grandmother was trying to login to hotmale, to check her email. They sorted out the spelling and the problem was solved.

Lesson: Never underestimate the power of homonyms.

¹ if you don’t already use firefox, you’ll really like it.

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just like it sounds – Frequently Asked Questions for dogs

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Umami is, quite simply, really really nummy.

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Last weekend had a history theme. On Saturday, I went out to Doors Open, the annual event where our old and unusual buildings and sites are filled with eager history lovers. (There’s a lot more of us that you would expect, apparently it’s hip to be square). I think Doors Open is pretty awesome, a super way to get to know what is slowly becoming my city. There are lots of different kinds of buildings included – you can see everything from dump trucks driving on giant mountains of sugar (at Redpath) to the secret and tingle inducing Lower Bay Station.

This year we concentrated on Jarvis, which was once a grand thoroughfare of mansions, then was widened for car traffic, and became lot less ritzy (the tour guides say “flophouses”, my parents say “whorehouses”). It’s now in the process of being prettied up again, with the mansions morphing into B&Bs and restaurants, much to the delight of the Post.

The tour Bret Snider* gave at the Gooderham house was interesting. He went to the trouble of wearing a uniform and bringing props. He explained his family history (he’s a Gooderham) and their fabulous wealth via interests in weapons (the enfield rifle); ladies underwear (corsets); insurance, and booze. He gave an engaging talk and showed off the house, which really is spectacular. But it was funny to hear his take on the class changes along Jarvis Street. Now, he says, that investors have bought up the properties, the street is returning to its glory days. He said something like “when you turn on the lights, the vermin scurry away”. He actually said “vermin”. Nice.

After that tour we did a bit more sightseeing and I got to visit my Dad’s old house on Sackville St. in Regent Park, which probably won’t be standing for much longer. I guess they would be the verminous side of my family?

Then on Sunday I got to go to an OCAP/Missing Plaque walking tour of Toronto’s Skid Row in the same neighbourhood**.

This tour was great, looking at both the history of the space as well as the attitudes to the poor and working people who have always lived in the area. We talked about “the house of providence” and “the house of industry”, facilities for the destitute, the old, and the casuals. Because, hey, it’s not just the way rich people lived that needs remembering, eh?

There were lots of reminders of how antidiluvean attitudes towards poor and working people are still around, even two hundred years later, though the walk wasn’t very “political”, there were still echoes and reminders of all the ways in which the past is relevant to the present.

They sent us home with a substantial photocopied guide, which I’m really looking forward to seeing published as a guidebook.

*My mom thought he was cute. She’s so dense in her family compactness

**Someone once posed the idea to me that the Eastern sides of cities in North America started out (i.e. during the time of heavy industry being downtown) poor or working class… the reason for this being that prevailing winds usually blow West to East. So the West side smells nicer and the rich people go there. Any idea if this is true? Most cities I’ve been in have a mix of rich and poor areas that is nothing as simple as East vs. West, but we don’t have smokestacks downtown anymore either.

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