Seagulls: adaptable, quick thinking and bold

Out taking pictures downtown, I could not help but notice all the seagulls. The Thames River hardly counts as a sea. And both Lake Erie and Lake Huron are many kilometres away from the city. I wondered, "Why does London have so many gulls?" And it's not just London. My suburb, Byron, has oodles and the farm fields surrounding the city can have thousands of the raucous birds flying about.

According to the BBC, seagulls are breaking their connection to the sea. With urban gulls, their only connection to the sea is their name and that connection is tenuous. There is no actual seagull. There are Great Black‐backed Gulls, Iceland Gulls, Kelp Gulls, Ring‐billed Gull . . . and more. Plus, no surprise, there are Hybrid Gulls. But there are no seagulls.

Quick thinking and very adaptable, urban gulls can be quite different than their waterfront cousins. They have learned how to live very successfully in the city. These are birds that most likely will never see the open water of the Great Lakes, let alone the salty, endless water of the ocean.

Shouldn't street lighting posts last longer?

While shooting pictures for this blog, I noticed that the concrete streetlight post I was using to steady my camera was cracked. It had a big, vertical crack extending for many inches right up through the centre of the post. This post would need to be replaced.

I'm not sure who made the post in question but I know a lot of concrete streetlight posts are made in Burlington, Ontario, by the StressCrete Group. These posts look good when new. That said, shouldn't these posts look good after a few years of use as well?

Cities are expensive. Replacing relatively new cracked concrete posts seems like an expense that would blind side the city. I wonder if these posts come with a guarantee or a promise of a minimum working life.

It was a fun, well-planned event but few came. Why?

Supposedly cities are great places to live as events held in a city draw on a much larger population base than events held in smaller towns and villages and therefore find it is much easier to attract enough folk to make the event a success.

Saturday, the locally-owned neighbourhood theatre, there is only one left in town, showed a family-oriented film. The tickets were $5. A combo of buttered popcorn, a child-sized drink plus a Christmas cane was $5. Tickets on the draw for a large, gift-basket were free to all children.

I took two of my granddaughters. One won the gift-basket and shared it with her sister. She wasn't as lucky as one might think. There weren't two dozen kids at the show. Not two dozen!

Neighbourhood folk had told the theatre owners how much they loved going to the theatre for a Christmas movie with their parents when they were young decades ago. How wonderful it would be, they said, if the little theatre would show a film aimed directly at families. Ah, the memories that could be created.

I bought our tickets online. I pictured a line-up going out the door and down the street. This didn't happen. I imagined my granddaughters having great memories of the day. They will have those. Winning the gift-basket was nice extra touch.

Did they enjoy the film? Yes. Had they seen the film before? Yes. Apparently cable had brought the film, Arthur's Christmas, right into their home and onto their massive 60-inch flat-screen television. It is getting awfully hard to get people to get out of their homes to share a community experience. The experience may very well have already been availble, and enjoyed, right there in their home.

Next time, I'm taking to Twitter and Facebook. I'm going to spread the word. I'd really like to see a lot more families taking part in the next family day event.

Twin towers overlook The Forks of the Thames

These two apartment towers are in the core of the City of London. The two towers are near the The Forks of the Thames. Although not the first downtown apartment towers, these two were among the tallest, if not the tallest, for awhile. The downtown core is slowly turning around and highend towers like these are indicative of the change in the fortunes of downtown. The number of people living downtown has gone up dramatically in recent years.

No home delivery

When I was a boy mail was delivered right to the home six days a week. The mail was left either in a mailbox beside the front door or the mail was slid through a slot in the front door to fall the the floor in the entry hall. Then, to save money, the delivery was cut to five days a week. Saturday delivery was eliminated.
 
Eventually some genius realized it would be cheaper cut out home delivery completely. The drop box was born. Today in many, possibly most, neightbourhoods in Canada, mail is not delivered right to the door but is left in a neighbourhood drop box for later retrieval by someone for each home.

There's been a lot of resistance to the drop boxes. I saw these in the first neighbourhood I lived in in London more than four decades ago. My present neighbourhood doesn't have these boxes. My mail is still delivered right to my door. How much longer this will continue is anyone's guess.

Water-blue panels in dynamic fan shapes once filled the arches

Looking carefully through my files, I found a photo of Museum London clad with the original deep-blue metal panels.

If you look carefully, you might notice the dynamic fan shapes filling the arches. These disappeared at the same time that the colour was changed.

It is too bad that the colour reproduction in the two images is so different. Different cameras, different chips and taken at different times. Ah, the weakness of photography. It has been ever thus. Film was just as bad. When I was studying photography I had to write a paper comparing skin tones when using Kodak film, Fuji film and Agfa film. Totally different looks.

Why is it a museum, not an art gallery?

Why is it Museum London? This question is so common that the museum has posted an answer online.

"Museum London is a multidisciplinary institution, housing and exhibiting works of historical art, contemporary art and historical artifacts. The term 'museum' provides a comprehensive description of what we do and references the artifacts we exhibit as well as both historical and contemporary art (i.e. Museum of Modern Art, New York). . . . The name was changed in 2001."

The museum likes to point out "the important historical aspect" of the organization. It presents itself as a guardian, if not "the" guardian, of great swaths of London history. Yet the history-oriented museum gets a lot of the history of its iconic building wrong—especially when it claims the original design of the building ignored its location at The Forks of the Thames.

Museum London brags that its current building, constructed in 1980, was designed by the renowned Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama. It was originally a deep, rich blue, a colour chosen to reflect its location at the historic forks location.

I attempted to get a photo showing the original appearance. I talked with a couple of people at the museum. When I mentioned the museum had originally been blue, they looked at me with complete surprise. Neither knew of any pictures showing a blue museum. It soon became clear that our guardian of local history knew very little about its own history, if a story going back less than four decades can be called history.

If Museum London wants to be an museum, it should act like one. It should address the changes made to Moriyama's creation and tell us why these changes, both big and small, were necessary.