Tom Toles hit it on the head yesterday, and that dovetails nicely with the article Unhappy Meals by Michael Pollan in the New York Times Magazine awhile back (thanks Elizabeth!), which starts with a handy rule of thumb:
…if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
Interesting comparison of Time Magazine covers for this week [whoops—they’ve changed issues already]—all the international editions feature a cover story on the resurgence of the Taliban; the U.S. cover features a story titled “Why We Should Teach the Bible in Public School”. Reminds me depressingly of a Tom Toles cartoon from two years ago.
We were hoping that the downtown free high-speed wireless internet network (Toronto Hydro’s OneZone) would allow us to make hospital blog posts, check our mail, etc., from our laptop. Here is my review of the service (written from my at-home computer, for reasons that will become obvious):
In the O.R. waiting room our MacBook found the wireless network easily enough, but we kept getting error messages. No biggie, we figured we were not getting a strong enough signal in that interior room, so we’d wait until we got to Jon’s room, where there’s a window. In Jon’s room we did get a better signal, but we had noticed in the signup instructions that it said once you access the network you’ll get a browser window automatically come up with the sign-up/login page. Oh, really?
After calling their support line we find out that this is a Windows-only thing; he gave me the sign-up web address over the phone. Not impressive, and kind of silly. What’s the point in making your sign-up/login page super-secret and inaccessible from your own website? He also warned me that OneZone does not support Macs. Stupider and stupider.
Once on the signup page, you enter your cellphone number, and get text messaged your login ID and password. If you put in spaces or hyphens where you enter your cellphone number, you get an error message (but nowhere does it initially warn you to leave them out—poor UI design). After four tries using two different cellphones, we finally got our ID and password.
So how was it? It’s slow. Reeeeally slow. I don’t know whether it’s just because I had a poor signal where I was, or if it’s a Mac/Windows thing, but I gave up making blog posts or accessing gmail because it just took forever. Peter and I successfully managed to iChat for a bit, but my messages kept piling up and then appearing in his window all at once, which I suppose is okay if you like non-sequiturs.
Luckily for our hospital stay, Toronto Hydro has extended the free access period—it was originally going to expire early March; now it’s early April. After all that hassle, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to pay for it!
This article from the Vancouver Courier updates the story of the Lee’s Candies fire, with a photo of Valeria in front of the outpourings of love surrounding what was formerly her store. Obviously other people cared about Valeria and her shop—someone actually started a fundraising drive to help her until Valeria put a stop to it. Since much of the store’s charm and appeal for customers and owner was its vintage character (both in-store and behind the scenes where the chocolates were made), it likely wouldn’t be possible to re-create. As Valeria says in the article, “With the old building and all the old equipment gone, our only choice would be to open in a modern space with modern equipment which would frankly bore the hell out of me.” Brava, spoken like a true artist!
Just as my ancient, beaten-up watch (a high-school graduation present!) does its annual “change my battery” stoppage, I read an interesting (though highly speculative) article in Slate that suggests that what with the proliferation of electronic devices with clocks on them (video equipment, kitchen appliances, computer, PDA, phone, etc), people are less likely to actually wear a watch any more. Watches may be worn as fashion accessories, or for sports-related reasons; they’re not really needed much for daily time-keeping.
Thoughts on the matter? Do you wear a watch less often than you used to? Nothing conclusive from this household: I still wear a watch; Peter and Jon never did.
A part of my childhood has just died…
A few blocks from our house in Vancouver was an old chocolate shop called Lee’s Candies. The shop was founded in the 1950s, and became a time-capsule of that era, with unchanged décor, moulds and scales from the 1920s, and an equally-ancient cash register that went “ka-ching!” in that satisfyingly old-fashioned way. The chocolates were made by hand, fresh every day, and were sold strictly by weight, not per piece.
The proprietor of the shop, in contrast, was an anachronism: Valeria, cheery with a plummy British accent, heavy Goth makeup and Morticia Addams hair, looking every inch like someone who would never be caught dead in a candy store. But she had worked in the store for years, learning the trade of the chocolate-maker, and eventually took over from the retiring owner, George Tedlock.
Many a time I would stop there after school and pick up a few squares of my favourite, mint truffle—better than any chocolate bar, but still cheap enough, even for a high school student.
Valeria barely eked out a living: she refused to modernize the store (I guess she really is Goth!), and cheerfully admitted that she probably made less than minimum wage. But she hung on, and became a neighbourhood institution.
Yesterday a four-alarm fire gutted three stores along the 4300 block of 10th Ave., and now Lee’s Candies is just a smouldering pile of rubble. I’m not sure that Valeria has the resources to start up again—new rents alone would be astronomical—and I know that developers are foaming at the mouth to raze those buildings and build condos. When there’s so much money at stake, I guess the fate of a little chocolate shop doesn’t really matter much—except to all the kids and adults who left messages of condolence attached to the chainlink fence around the storefront ruins.
Happier days…
We’ve been busy working on things for the past few weeks, and now’s the time to spill the beans about it. It’s a couple of projects that will go under the collective banner of Doodle of the Week, related to our past lives as kids’ science authors. While we work on the main event for the site, we’ve decided to serve up an appetizer: our 1993 out-of-print book Born Smart?—all 113 pages of it—will be posted on the site. It’s digitally remastered—scanned, cleaned-up and coloured—and content updated where it needs to be. Courtesy of our French publisher, we’re posting it in French, too. And it will take a while to do, so we’ll post about two pages a week.
And there’s something more exciting coming to the site too; we can’t talk about it just yet.
We’re looking forward to this. The freelance lifestyle can be terribly reactive: after all, you’re job is to respond to the client’s needs, or their arbitrary wants. Sometimes that can leave one a little cynical. Both of us feel great getting back to this kind of work.
It will take time to get this into full swing, and it will be entirely in our spare time until we can figure out how (or if) it can generate income.
In the meantime, don’t spread the word just yet. We’ll let you know when things are about to get interesting on the site. Stay tuned.