Jake & Josh's Mum’s Neighborhood

For whatever reason, the musical duo seems to be making a comeback. It's refreshing, given the ongoing trend of promoting self-indulgent solo artist that's continuing to destroy great collaborations like No Doubt and BEP in favour of spotlight-hogging divas like Gwen Stefani and Fergie.

Sure, the duo seems most at home in the field of electronica, but at least they're producing great music without focusing on the cult of personality. The French duo Justice is one shining example, but there's also MGMT, Basement Jaxx, Cassius, Simian Mobile Disco, and to a much lesser extent Daft Punk.

Well, add another to that list. Walter Meego is a Chicago-based duo and, while I'm not entirely sold on their music, their song "Girls" is just about the catchiest little trifle I've heard this summer. It's got the simplest of lyrics, but that just makes it all the easier to memorize, so I've pretty much boppin' around the city with this song lodged in my ear for the past two weeks.

In Syracuse, gas was $4.21/gal. Honestly, I have no idea if that's good or bad, I'm so used to the metric system - but it was the average in the area. Fine.

A few stations were advertising a price of $4.13/gal. Of course we went there, hoping to save a few bucks. Well, those a$$holes were lying.

Turns out, there's fine print on the sign. Gas was actually $4.23/gal unless you buy a car wash. That's just false advertising. Who has time to read the fine print on these signs while looking for gas from the road?

Why isn't this practice illegal? It's certainly immoral. Deceit doesn't build a client base, you know.

Jerks.

The week before we headed south, we bought a new toy - a GPS (or SatNav as the Brits say) - and didn't it prove to be the most invaluable little tool.

Aside from the obvious help in getting us to our destination, we found it really useful when it came time to find restaurants and stores. This model has a feature that lists "what's nearby" sorted into categories, and completely searchable. So put in "pho" and you get a list of local pho vietnamese restaurants, as well as tons of photography stores. It took us to places in Syracuse we'd never been before, and we found a pretty rockin' little Indian buffet up near the University.

This is a toy that's totally worth the moolah.

Last weekend we unwound in upstate New york (is Albany considered upstate?). The trip included stops in Albany (to see Comedienne Kathy Griffin), Waterloo (to shop) and Syracuse (because there aren't any hotels in Waterloo.)

Kathy was wonderful - so quick-witted. Her routine is clearly only partly scripted. Aside from a few segments that she could tell any time, most of her act involved gossip about the latest celebrity headlines and the dumbass things they do. Her biggest targets were Paula Abdul's blundering on American Idol (she's either hepped up on goofballs or the judges' comments are completely scripted) and Mylie Cyrus's recent photoshoot cuddling with her dad (which is just creepy).

Kathy's humour isn't so much about content - there's nothing inherently funny about The View or Oprah (except that these shows have an audience - oh wait, I'm confusing funny with sad again) - it's about her delivery. She comes out with some truly witty turns of phrase, making Hollywood bigwigs look the fools they are. And it's all done so off-the-cuff - some of these gossip stories are only days old - that it seems likely her upcoming Toronto show in August will be almost completely different from the one we saw in Albany. I'd be lying if I said we aren't tempted to go.

It was well worth the 6-hour drive to Albany. And that's saying a lot because Albany doesn't have much else to offer.

We stayed in the "entertainment district" and let me tell you, it was pretty dead by the time we arrived around 5pm. The area doubles as the business district and, like Ottawa, it simply empties out in the evening. We spent hours wandering around looking for a liquor store and a decent restaurant that was open for dinner, but to little avail. In fact, the hotel staff said they couldn't advise us of a place to go buy liquor that would be safe.

How can people live like that, scared of their own city? Last October we walked throughout Manhattan - day and night - and never once felt threatened. What's with Albany?!

Still, we took a few pics the morning before we left, checking out the state legislature building and a kind of cool, sci-fi looking area that was actually a mix of government buildings and a performing arts theatre, known as the egg - for obvious reasons.

Then we decided enough was enough and, after a quick trip to iHop (We never go to the US and don't go to iHop), we hightailed it outta there and headed towards a full day of shopping in Waterloo.

Waterloo (about 20 muinutes from Syracuse) is a bit of a hidden treasure. Everytime we mention it, people ask "You mean Watertown?" No, not Watertown. Watertown is a hole. Waterloo is a hole with an outlet mall. And amazing deals! Banana Republic at 50% off?! Hello! Sign me up.

Very happy we didn't take Margot's challenge of not buying new clothes for a year. I think we spent about $600 each. I got loads of new dress pants and nice shirts, and I got 4 new pairs of shoes (that would be my mother's genes kicking in.) Mel did similarly well and, after more than 6 hours of shopping - and a visit to Arby's (I never go to the US and don't go to Arby's) - the stores closed at 9pm.

We headed back to Syracuse for the night to prepare for the 100% accurate trip through customs the next day.

I always have a song running through my head. Always. Next time you see me, just ask and I'll be happy to tell you what it is. Thankfully, the playlist is pretty dynamic. My internal deejay does a good job of keeping it interesting - switching it up pretty frequently.

Still, there are days when it's just one song over and over and over. Generally that's a result of having heard a great new song, and on those days I'm usually quite pleased to have the earworm. It keeps me smiling.

But on occasion, I do get a nasty piece of music in my head -- a tune I truly dislike and just will not go away. This happened last weekend, and I realize by writing about it that the song is already back in my head. Yargh.

We went out dancing on Friday night and the deejay was horrible. She wasn't mixing well at all and she just kept playing track after track of bad music. Then came the coup de grâce: Tainted Love by Soft Cell. It burrowed deep and nested in my brain all day Saturday. It was only after intense alcohol therapy on Saturday evening that I was finally able to put an end to the cursed thing - killing a few brain cells in the process, I'm sure. I don't mind this approach to killing earworms, but my liver might not like it - so I do need to find a different method.

Thankfully, Radiolab offered me some hope. In today's podcast, they asked people to phone in suggestions about how to get rid of these unwanted attacks - whether it be passing the earworm to someone else,  replacing it with a better song, or simply listening to a recording of it. Check out their blog and listen to this short (10 min) piece on earworms while I struggle to get Tainted Love out of my head...again.

The weather has been very uncooperative lately. The weekend was a wash and any possibility of playing tennis or going running has been put on hold until the rains cease.

The weather isn't all bad though. At least it's helping bring our new garden along.

Last Thursday we went to a nursery and muddled our way through the purchase of plants and soil for our back deck. Gardening is new for both of us, so this is definitely a test. We managed to pick a few types of flowers and on Friday, before the rains started, got the hanging boxes mounted and the flowers in the soil - Petunias and Pansies and a few others that we don't know the names of.

All in all, we're happy with the look. We left one bed open for planting some herbs, and we still need to get a few more large pots for the floor - we'd like to get a hibiscus, and I want some begonias - but overall, very satisfied. We're about one week into this great experiment and everything seems to still be alive, and growing from the nice moist soil.

Still, they've had enough rain now. As you can see we have a hose, so we don't need nature to do all the work. And after all, don't plants need sun and warm weather too? I know I do.

We invite you to read this article by Bill McKibben, a highly-regarded American writer on science & environmental issues.

It's not good news, I'm afraid.

--

Earth at 350
By Bill McKibben

May 12, 2008 - It's not just the economy. We've gone through swoons before. It's that gas at $4 a gallon means we're running out, at least of the cheap stuff that built our sprawling society. It's that when we try to turn corn into gas, it sends the price of a loaf of bread shooting upwards and starts food riots on three continents. It's that everything is so inextricably tied together. It's that, all of a sudden, those grim Club of Rome types who, way back in the 1970s, went on and onabout the "limits to growth" suddenly seem... how best to put it, right.

All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth. There's a number--a new number--that makes this point most powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A few weeks ago, our foremost climatologist, NASA's Jim Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several co-authors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high, and if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.

And suddenly, the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent greenhouse gas, accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to soar as well. Apparently, we've managed to warm the far north enough to start melting huge patches of permafrost and massive quantities of methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth.

And don't forget: China is building more power plants, India is pioneering the $2,500 car, and Americans are converting to TVs the size of windshields that suck juice ever faster.

Here's the thing. Hansen didn't just say that, if we didn't act, there was trouble coming; or, if we didn't yet know what was best for us, we'd certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His phrase was: "...if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill ten times more trees this year than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere, and apparently dooms Canada's efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the US from Alberta's tar sands.)

We're the ones who kicked off the warming; now, the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80 percent of the sun's heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them -- to reverse course. Here's the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush Administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

In the next two or three years, the nations of the world are supposed to be negotiating a successor treaty to the Kyoto Accord. When December 2009 rolls around, heads of state are supposed to converge on Copenhagen to sign a treaty -- a treaty that would go into effect at the last plausible moment to heed the most basic and crucial of limits on atmospheric CO2.

If we did everything right, says Hansen, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out we might even be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of some of those tipping points, like the Road Runner screeching to a halt at the very edge of the cliff.

More likely, though, we're the Coyote -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way we made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones, so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.

That's possible -- we launched a Marshall Plan once, and we could do it again, this time in relation to carbon. But in a month when the President has, once more, urged us to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that seems unlikely. In a month when the alluring phrase "gas tax holiday" has danced into our vocabulary, it's hard to see (though it was encouraging to see that Clinton's gambit didn't sway many voters). And if it's hard to imagine sacrifice here, imagine China, where people produce a quarter as much carbon apiece as we do.

Still, as long as it's not impossible, we've got a duty to try. In fact, it's about the most obvious duty humans have ever faced. A few of us have just launched a new campaign, 350.org. Its only goal is to spread this number around the world in the next eighteen months, via art and music and ruckuses of all kinds, in the hope that it will push those post-Kyoto negotiations in the direction of reality.

After all, those talks are our last chance; you just can't do this one light bulb at a time. And if this 350.org campaign is a Hail Mary pass, well,sometimes those passes get caught.

We do have one thing going for us: this new tool the web, which at least allows you to imagine something like a grassroots global effort. If the Internet was built for anything, it was built for sharing this number, for making people understand that "350" stands for a kind of safety, a kind of possibility, a kind of future.

Hansen's words were well-chosen: "a planet similar to that on which civilization developed." People will doubtless survive on a non-350 planet, but those who do will be so preoccupied, coping with the endless unintended consequences of an overheated planet, that civilization may not.

Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, this side of 350. That's the limit we face.

High-end food is a rarity in Ottawa. Or at least good high-end food. Or at least good high-end food that doesn't cost an arm and a leg - I'm looking at you, Beckta.

last weekend we treated ourselves to a little top-chef-style cuisine at a local (and I use the term 'local' loosely) hidden gem: Mariposa Farm. It's a 300-acre duck and goose farm in Plantagenet that promotes local, organically grown products (both veggies and meat). So no sleeping in for us on Sunday; we had to be up with the lark to get out to Plantagenet - about 30 minutes drive past Orleans - for the 11am lunch sitting. Oh, the lengths we go to for good food...

But it was well worth it. The meal was pricey at $35 - but not unreasonable for the quality of both the ingredients (they either produce everything on-site or source it from local farms withing a small radius; something like 100 km, I think) and the food (some seriously tasty and inventive dishes). And this was a 3-course table d'hôte, so definitely a little more bang for the buck.

As for the dishes, they change every week, but we pretty much got to sample all three options available for each course. I was happy with all my own choices. The duo of duck and goose liver pâtés was a nice little starter, but the main course - grilled goose breast with pureed cauliflower, and a white currant sauce was to die for. The addition of a piece of rendered duck skin was welcome, offering a bit of texture in every mouthful. And it was served with fresh fiddleheads! Yum!

While I would usually pick the chocolate item for dessert - like Mel did - I was seduced by the offer of a cheese plate, featuring four locally made cheeses. Needless to say, I had my fair share of Mel's chocolate mousse too.

And what could be better? We ended the meal with a quick tour of the farm, guided by the owner. It was definitely a treat and, despite the distance, something we'll do again if ever we have foodie guests in town that don't mind a Sunday morning drive out to the country.

I said I would post the "Olympics Games, Stylized" ad when I found it on Youtube. So here it is.

It's so cleverly done, but unfortunately very hard to see what's going on because it's a low quality video. I recommend first turning up the gamma setting on your monitor.

Basically the camera stays more or less stable and the people dressed in black in the background move objects and athletes around to make it look like the camera has paused or shifted positions. I'm just really impressed by the choreography and wish The Bay would do a few more ads in this campaign.

The volleyball one is my favorite.

Well, considering my last post was 4 days ago, I guess I spoke too soon.

I have loads of things I want to write about, but now I'm too busy catching up on stuff at work to write blogs during the day, and I can't find the time to sit down in the evening to write either.

I'm sure the world will stop spinning so quickly some day. Hopefully soon.

And now, back to the Annual Report (second draft - We're getting there!)