March winds in late November

A special weather statement was issued this morning forecasting wind gusts up to 80 kilometres per hour. Homeowners, outside the city, living in farm homes exposed to the full force of the windy weather could experience gusts as high as 90 km/h. Environment Canada said a sharp cold front would blast the London area Wednesday afternoon.

By mid afternoon the neighbour's flag was flapping wildly in the wind, neighbourhood trees were threatening to topple onto lawns and the air was thick with wind-blown leaves.

The Lego public school

Byron Somerset Public School was opened in the early 1990s. It and the many suburban homes surrounding it were all built on land reclaimed from a former gravel pit. A new school on new land in a new neighbourhood demanded a new look. Byron Somerset got the new look in spades.

My kids went there. It was just a short walk away. Did they like the look? No. The little school, it has less than 400 students, was called The Lego School by the students.

Today, almost three decades later, some of metal panels are badly chipped, some are bent and there are many signs of wear and tear. Still, I must admit, it has aged better than I ever thought it would. It is aging rather gracefully.

Over-the-air television signals facing phase out

When I was a boy all television signals were free, picked up by a rabbit-ear antenna sitting on top of a massive television set filled with tubes. We were only able to view about four channels but three were the American network signals, ABC, CBS and NBC and the fourth was the local CBC outlet.

There are still two tall television towers in London but it is a question as to how much longer these will  remain standing. The one shown was slated to be shut down a couple of years ago. At the last minute, it was given a reprieve.

Cable has replaced rabbit-ears almost everywhere. Television is no longer free. It can cost the better part of a thousand dollars annually. On the plus side there are so many extra cable channels. On the downside who cares as sometimes there's less to watch today with 50 or 60 channels than there was in the past with only four.

Some nights the same program is playing on as many as three channels at the same time. It doesn't take long before one has seen every episode of Frasier, Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory or Modern Family. Other times a Living Dead festival will commandeer one or more channels to present days and days of solid gore. Ugh! The Living Dead is one series that is dead to me.

We get three network news channels: CBC, CNN and FOX. CBC is essentially a loop a lot of the time and some days it can be an awfully small loop. CNN get hung up on a story, for the past few months this has been Trump, and like a dog with bone CNN just won't let it go. Both CBC and CNN can be downright boring on account of the repetition. And watching Fox News is simply bad for my blood pressure. Interestingly enough, repetition with Fox News would not be boring but I might pop a blood vessel as my blood pressure climbed.

So what did we watch on our in-house entertainment centre last night? My wife found Roman Holiday in black and white and starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck showing on TCM, Turner Classic Movies. I can recall watching that film on an old Coronet television set when I was a boy. Of course, Roman Holiday wasn't a classic back then.

Space Scooter sold briefly in Canada

Reportedly, the Space Scooter was developed in the Netherlands, is now sold across Europe and in the States. For the moment, it seems to have been pulled from the Canadian market.

I'm posting this older photo as a follow up to yesterday's submission looking at an Ontario toy store that's expanding across Canada. Mastermind Toys was the only store stocking the Space Scooter a couple of years ago. It's an imaginative toy sold by an imaginative retailer.

Mastermind had a unit available for testing right on the floor. Online retailers can offer a lot but they cannot offer an immediate, hands-on testing experience.

My granddaughter discovered the Space Scooter had no learning curve at all. Rocking the platform came very naturally. She simply got on and took off.

I've often wondered how common these are in the Netherlands. I understand the latest model, the X590, has two speeds and dual brakes. I could see using one of these for neighbourhood shopping runs.

London has two of these toy stores

I used to think selling toys was easy. Then Toys R Us in the States filed for bankruptcy. That was an eye opener. Then the Scholastics chain sold its toy store in London to the Mastermind Toys group. Soon after that the small, locally-owned toy store in North London was sold to Mastermind Toys as well.

A good argument can be made that Toys R Us folded in the U.S. because it was bled dry by its hedgefund owner. Backing up that belief is the fact that Toys R Us is still operating in Canada. The Canadian division was bought by a large, Canadian investor and the stores remained open. Are the stores profitable? I believe so, but stay tuned.

The first Mastermind Toys store opened 35 years ago in Toronto. Within a decade there were about ten more stores scattered across the Toronto area. Today there are stores in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well.

Mastermind Toys is doing more than simply opening new stores to guarantee its survival. It has entered into a partnership with the WE Social Entrepreneurs Initiative. The Mastermind Toys folk have carefully nurtured a reputation for caring for their customers and for the communities in which they operate. And the company likes to brag that it is Canadian—a real plus in today's market place.

Supposedly, American and Canadian builders understand cladding

Look carefully at the above apartment. Note the beige-painted, metal skinned, insulated cladding on the top two floors of most exteriors walls. This exterior, retrofit over-cladding is very common on older mid-rise buildings, usually apartments, in London. The new cladding may be used on the the top floor only or it may extend down six or seven floors or more.

I had never given retrofitted cladding any thought until an architect I know asked why it was there. I shrugged my shoulders. I assumed it was for insulating reasons but, if so, why didn't it extend down the building all the way to the bottom?

Questions about retrofitted exterior cladding on midrise apartment building took on added importance after the Grenfell Tower fire in London, England. The 24-storey building was gutted by a fire that moved rapidly up the building under relatively new retrofitted exterior cladding. At least 72 people, maybe more, died in the resulting inferno.

I am now investigating cladding as it is being used in London. When I have some answers, I'll update this post. It's an interesting story as insulating a building with the addition of exterior cladding is not a simple job as the Grenfell Tower fire demonstrates.

A coarsening of Canadian culture

Back when I was a boy in the '50s, I cannot imagine a restaurant chain promoting a name containing the words "Fat Bastard". Not so today. Apparently this restaurant chain was born in Canada; it's a Canadian concept. And it's a Canadian concept the many of us find exceedingly offensive.

Researching this, I came across an article in Now magazine: Fat Bastard Burrito's racy hustle. It said about the company logo at that time:
"Its logo trades on the worst stereotypes about Mexicans. It features a fat man with a mustache and a gold tooth. He's wearing a poncho and a sombrero. And he's riding a donkey while eating a burrito which, for the record, is Tex-Mex cuisine as popularized in North America, not Mexican."

As I write this, I wondered if I was being overly sensitive. I googled it and discovered: research shows that the word "bastard" is generally deemed to be offensive. Criticizing the use of bastard appears to be a safe, conservative position.

OFCOM, the Office of Communications in the U,K. warns regulated broadcasters to stay aware of the 'cumulative effect' of casual swearing. But, you may ask, what is the 'cumulative effect'? These are just words goes the defence.

Casual profanity is rude, its use coarsens society and culture, while the flip side of the coin is that it even ruins the usefulness of swearing itself. A lose-lose proposition.