Don't be a lout - Part III
    The boob at left may be socially retarded, but that impairment doesn't qualify him for the seats Pearson International Airport sets aside for the physically handicapped. Able-bodied, ambulatory and an airport employee, he might be expected to heed house rules. Instead, he sets the contrary example. Taking a coffee break, he parked himself in this nearest seat rather than in any of several dozen non-reserved ones nearby. Not because he wasn't up to walking the extra few steps but because he saw no reason to.
    We may imagine that if someone genuinely handicapped had come along, he might have moved. No such person did, so we'll never know, but we do know that a handicapped person might well hesitate to challenge a trespasser so obviously inconsiderate.
    The lout, alas, is not alone in his attitude that provisions made to lessen the difficulties of the disabled have no relevance to him except as an inconvenience to be ignored. His like are everywhere, from public transport to public toilets, from priority lanes to parking lots, usurping spaces set aside for the less lucky in life.  Do not imitate him. We're meant to think not only of ourselves. It's called civilization.

Artists and vandals
    People with paint can make a big difference downtown. Most graffiti — simple-minded scrawls defacing countless surfaces throughout the city centre —declares disrespect for property, whether public or private. Each bit adds to an impression that the area has become lawless, derelict and unsafe. Bylaws trying to avoid this by saddling property-owners with the cleanup costs merely victimize them twice.
   But paint used intelligently can also beautify, as in the huge mural behind The Honest Lawer on Queens Avenue or in the instance at left, where it perked up the dull stucco front of this building at Dundas and Richmond. For years now, Londoners have looked up and smiled at the couple and their child leaning out of a trompe l'oeil balcony on some patriotic occasion and waving to folk below. It's no masterpiece, but it's honourable work and the artist, V. Harrison, was proud to sign  it.
   Not so the fool who leaned down from the roof one night and painted "DUBBLE!" above it — and a lucky thing for him. That contemptible vandalism has been there for years too, and one hopes the fool has grown old enough to realize that his folly has made the city's core's just a little bit uglier and thus its economy (and indirectly his own) just a little bit weaker.
    The stucco is badly weathered these days and one hopes Harrison's art will be kept in any eventual restoration. But we'll be glad when we're no longer affronted daily by the eyesore above it.
    As for the one below it, that's an affront of a different order, but not entirely unrelated.

Chew on this, 
Rubbermaid
    Coons and squirrels just love our garbage. Plastic garbage cans won't keep them away from it. Racoons can unlatch them and lift the lid, but squirrels will chew at the top night after night till they've got a hole big enough to climb through.
   Both kinds of critters leave a disgusting mess, but squirrels are worse because once that hole's chewed, the garbage can is open house every night.
    Metal cans thwart the squirrels and challenge even the coons, but they're no match for the garbage collectors, who dent and crush them in a matter of weeks till the lids won't fit.
    We finally settled on storing our garbage in a metal can and then emptying that into a plastic one with an as-yet-unchewed cover to put out at the curb on garbage night. Streetlights and the passing traffic seem to keep critters at bay for the few hours till dawn.
    But I want to know why you can't just replace a plastic can's lid, instead of also having to buy a new can each time too, and ending up with a bunch of unwanted lidless cans that garbage collectors won't take away unless you cut them in pieces. How smart is that?  
 

Who edits editors?
   The text at left is me, in a letter to the editor of the Free Press, replying to an editorial-page column by reporter Joe Belanger in which he blasted an earlier article by freelancer Herman Goodden. Herman lives just across the river from Harris Park and the noise from festivals there, like Rock the Park, nearly rock him out of bed. (They rocked me too, in a condo overlooking the park; soon after its bandshell went in, I got out.) Herman also has to suffer the sonic assaults from Victoria Park.
   Joe seemed mostly angry at Herman's distaste for the kind of music being blared, but he was also incensed that downtown residents should see their need to sleep as a priority over festival revellers' desire to keep rockin' far into the night. There were only a few of these spoil-sports, Joe said, and it wasn't very often. The implication was that they ought to be glad to go sleepless a few weeks every year for the sake of the tourist trade.
   I fired off a tiny squib citing what I felt to be Joe's errors. It was only six sentences, but some editor felt the need to shorten it (the line greyed out here; presumably it was none of my business where Joe lives) and in doing so managed to reassign Joe's quoted words to quite another Joe: our mayor, whose dippy proposal for louder and longer noise-fests started all this in the first place. Way to go, guys.
   

A shade too private
   It's become all too common for drivers to have all their windows so darkened that they can't be seen. Some may think of it as privacy. More, I believe, think of it as armour. Unseen, they can doff their seat belts, phone, text, gesture obscenely, pick their noses, drink their beer — who's to stop them? They're invisible.
   The civic simpleton at left felt free to park right beside a fire-route no-parking sign. It was a hot day and she had her windows down, but the moment a camera turned her way, the touch of a button rolled up the glass and, voila! instant anonymity.
   Because police so steadily ignore the trend, it might surprise a lot of people to learn that it's illegal. Ontario law forbids the tinting of vehicles' front-seat windows on either side. Windows abaft that can be as dark as desired — although there ought to be limits on the degree of tinting there too, because a cyclist coming up alongside a parked car with darkened glass can't see whether there's a driver about to open a door into his path.
   Assume that people who go in for this wrap-around concealment are up to no good. Otherwise, why are they hiding?

Canada's best theatre company, at Niagara-on-the-Lake

   Consider this as “other stuff” — definitely not complaint. We've just come back from a couple of days at Niagara-on-the-Lake and rediscovered yet again why the Shaw Festival is our favourite summer self-indulgence.
   So far we've seen only four of this year's 11 plays and I'll mention only two since this blog is meant to be brief, but take my word for it: If you come away from any production at the Shaw without having seen something wonderful — well, as someone else once wrote, we won't refund your money, but we will give you advice.
   The threadbare fellow taking tea here is Steven Sutcliffe, who stars in The Admirable Crichton, a sort of cross between Upstairs/Downstairs and Gilligan's Island. It's a lightweight piece but after director Morris Panych, musical director Ryan deSouza and designers Ken MacDonald and Charlotte Dean get through with it you'll leave the theatre wanting to dance. The performances are delightful.
   Drama at Inish is a mixed bag, but the best bits are as good as theatre gets. A classical repertory troupe arrives in an Irish seaside town, stimulating culture and stirring catastrophe. Thom Marriott and Corrine Koslo as the leading thespians sum up in their final exit all the reasons why I adore actors.
   The Shaw has so many great ones. David Schurmann plays a lord in one of the pieces, and a different lord in another. He's perfect  in both, as always. It would take far too long to explain why I adore David Schurmann. So I won't.

Clip it, clueless
   Hedges beside sidewalks are fine; hedges hanging over them aren't. If you've got one of these, keep it trimmed, not sticking out so far that people have to step off the pavement to get around it or else risk their clothes being marked or mutilated.
  The example here is bad enough; at least the day is fine and both the overgrown greenery and the boulevard are dry. But it could just as easily be raining, the hedge dripping wet and the boulevard a quagmire. And of course the obstruction will still be there in the winter, each branch loaded with snow or sheathed in ice and the boulevard barred by the piled-up frozen wake of the sidewalk plow.
   Have you noticed, too, how often property-owners who let their shaggy shrubbery grow this intrusive seem to prefer the kind with thorns?  Not only inconsiderate but passive-agressive. Walk with a machete.

What's with you, bozo? You lame or just lame-brained?
   Yeah, you over at the cash machine. There were 73 vacant spaces in the parking lot just behind you on the other side of the fire lane you're blocking. I counted them.
   You didn't look lame walking up to the ATM. So I guess that would make you either a simple ignoramus or just a lout too lazy to park where you're meant to and walk an extra 20 paces to get where you're going. Or maybe I failed to see that you had a badge on your chest saying you're such an important character that the red-lettered sign at the curb saying
                                                                        NO PARKING
                                                                          FIRE LANE
doesn't apply to the likes of you. Or, let's see , , , maybe you were in a hurry. Awww.
   Fire lanes aren't a frivolity, fool. When fire trucks need to get somewhere, they need to get there in a hurry. You're in the way.
   I hope you were overdrawn at the cash machine. And I hope your fire insurance lapses.

Social sins
and fashion lapses
   I know, I know, we just did the keep-your-damned-feet -off-the-seats thing, but here's the same pig-ignorant bus behaviour paired with a sartorial eyesore too egregious to go uncensored.
   First of all, guys, sandals are fine for the beach, the back yard, or the pilgrim's road to Santiago de Compostela. Worn elsewhere, they suggest that you are not now, nor have you ever been, a member of the serious grownups. If you just can't resist them, at least keep ’em discreetly on the floor. Parking them where other people will soon be sitting is not only uncouth and inconsiderate but unsightly as well.
   Further, if you must wear this particular style of sandals, don't wear them with socks. It makes your foot look like a cow's hoof. And you, sir — you in particular, you with your feet on the furniture — you're not really a cow, are you? You're an ass.

Which way to the liquor aisle?
   I often want a glass of wine in the evening. Occasionally I'll have one at supper. Once in a blue moon I feel like a gin and tonic. (How does a gin and tonic feel, you ask? Don't be a wise guy.)
   The nearest liquor store is inconveniently far. But there's a very well-run Valu-mart just four blocks away. I want it to have wines and spirits along with all the coffee, corn flakes and cake mixes.
  The store owner would like nothing better, and says all his customers want it too. Everyone I know wants it. A poll done this month for the Ontario Convenience Store Association found 61 per cent of Ontarians want it. What's the hold-up?
   It's not as though it's hard. In any European country it's normal. The English shopper in Sainsbury's thinks nothing of picking up a bottle of Beaune or Bergerac with his groceries. In Quebec, any backwoods dépanneur offers a modest selection of good French wines.
   Here in the land of drag-your-feet, our politicians have only got around to letting some of the biggest  supermarkets pair with some of the biggest Ontario wineries to set up in-store wine outlets separate from the grocery side — each store selling only one winery's plonk.
   It can be done better, though. In small centres where demand is sufficient for profitability but not for a stand-alone liquor store, the LCBO does sometimes set up separate little operations in — are you ready? — convenience stores. A good example is just down the road in Thamesford, where you can pick up a Pinot or a Piesporter in the 7-Eleven.
   At last report, Thamesford had not fallen into anarchy.