an elephant gets in the way

perhaps not the funniest of these but certainly the most personally relevant :P

thank you mr. updike

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

- John Updike -

photos from John Updike: A life in pictures @ The Guardian

happy day

Obama stops Guantanamo hearings @ BBC

Prosecutors request suspension of Guantanamo trials on order from Obama @ CBC

US President Barack Obama is expected to sign an executive order to start the process of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within days. @ BBC

hopping glad

singing lessons

I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

To our neighbours and friends,
have the happiest Martin Luther King day EVER!

the illustration is by patrick moberg.

find the poem and more from langston hughes here.

the photograph of langston hughes as a boy (c. 1912) is from here.

the photograph of langston hughes on the steps in harlem in 1958 is from here.

this a a cross post from the literacies café.

speaking of the 80s...

Here is a photo, a kinda blurry scan, of my roommates and me sitting on the deck of our first apartment in Toronto. That is me in the middle. The apartment was on Delaware Avenue between Shanly and Hallam. It was a fantastic two-story place with a balcony off the living room and a deck on the third floor. We were a bit scared when we rented this place because it was soooo expensive - $650.00 a month!

We had lots of fun times here. You can tell it is the olden days because of the stubbies (the beer bottles). We used to drink Northern beer in those days. I am pretty sure that the snack is guacamole and corn chips.

I am not sure who took this photo but I think it might have been the same Keith that took the photos in #80sphotoday. The beautiful sweaters drying behind us are ones my mum made for me but that we all used to wear on wintry evenings. She also made the sweater I am wearing. My shoes are from Honest Ed's!

The pink chair in the foreground was a donation from my grandma. I still have it but I painted it blue.

#80sphotoday

It is 80s photo day on Twitter so I thought I would post this set of pictures I scanned for my cousins of their visit to Washington DC (we used to live there) in the early 80s. This set is from a trip we made to Rehobeth Beach, Delaware. The people in the photos are my cousin Jill, her husband Geoff, her 3 sons (from oldest to youngest: Stephen, Darryl and wee Ian), my sister Julie and me. The photographer is our friend Keith - he is the foreground of this picture that I took.

longitude and latitude

Back in September I went to politicalcompass.org and did the questionnaire. Here is where I am on the map according this set of criteria:Here is the map of the Canadian political parties:And here is a map of a set of international political figures:So what's up? How come I am waaaay down there in the lower left corner? I am obviously not a more radical thinker than the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. I guess it is the lefty politics coupled with my obnoxious resistance to authority that lands me there on my own.

At first it startled me and made me feel a little lonely. Then, in an odd way, seeing myself as this little far off dot made me feel quite calm. Now that I can measure the distance, I find can listen much more openly and patiently to political rhetoric and analysis than I could when I was trying to see how my odd combination of beliefs and understandings fit with those of an existing political party. Now I do not try to fit things together. I make a map, plot out our relative positions, follow the contours, find the contested ground and calculate the mileage. In kilometres of course!

happy 2009

nye pictionary

one of the things we did on this frosty nye was play a wee game of movie pictionary.
i have tried to replicate some of the entries here. (answers at the end).

a. we started with this one by georgia.
the dots represent small words. it took peter and i ages to guess the first word
even though georgia gave us about 100 hints. naomi got it right away when we showed it to her.
















b. then i tried this - mostly because i wanted to draw a bum. my first drawing was harshly criticized. i included some legs and georgia thought it looked like a bum on a stump and a badly wrapped present. i revised the drawing to something a little like this and she got it quite quickly.



















c. i kinda liked this attempt but it turns out georgia had never heard of it.












d. georgia really made us laugh with this one.














e. the one that made us laugh the hardest and the longest was this.
peter devised the concept and michelle drew it for him.

(ʍou sdıl ,o dnɔ ɐ) ʍou ǝsdʎlɐɔodɐ ˙ǝ
(ɥood ǝɥʇ ʎǝuıɥʍ) ɥood ǝɥʇ ǝıuuıʍ ˙p
ǝosnɹɔ uosuıqoɹ ˙ɔ
ʍopuıʍ ɹɐǝɹ ˙q
puıʍ ǝɥʇ ɥʇıʍ ǝuoƃ ˙ɐ

Sorry -- some people cannot see the upside down answers. You can click here.