Is it still graffiti
if it’s beautiful?
    Beyond the parking lot on the west side of Clarence Street between Dundas and Queens is a sight to lift your spirits and make you smile.
    This bright, playful mural not only turns the once-drab side of the building at 196 Dundas into a treat for the eye but also cleverly directs your attention to other aspects of downtown that are well worth your consideration. It’s a celebration of the city’s core.
     You note the allusions one by one: the Market Tower's clock; miscellaneous details of heritage architecture, the crenellation of chimneys that crown our surviving stock of 19th-century buildings; the Victoria Park gates and the green oasis beyond . . .
    Below all these is a vivid confusion of coloured shapes that I take to be the signature, or perhaps a manifesto, of the artist, a ‘tagger’ who has gone impressively upmarket but still acknowledges a cultural link to the defacers of post boxes and railway cars. Lower still, a welter of this and that — lesser things that one is tempted to think may have been added by friends or rivals yet to make that artistic leap; tributes perhaps, or spite.
    Graffiti this may be, but art it undoubtedly is as well — a stimulating visual pick-me-up.

It’s meant to be
a hands-on job
    A bus driver has his passengers’ lives in his hands. This one had 27 in his — plus a plate of hot pizza.

    Bowling down Richmond Street in a London Transit No. 4 bus (Oxford East), he stopped to grab  the take-out lunch, then pulled back into traffic and carried on, steering with one wrist while holding the paper plate with his right hand and feeding himself with his left.

    No other vehicles are in the photo, but there were lots about; it was the middle of the afternoon rush — 5:26 p.m. to be precise. It would have been instructive to see our man’s reaction if a car ahead had done something unexpected. Or if a slice of hot pizza had slid into his lap.

   London Transit has some fine drivers — capable, friendly, helpful, patient men and women ready to get out of their seats to show a young cyclist how to use the bus’s bicycle rack, willing to take an extra minute to make sure a newcomer knows where to transfer in order to reach his destination. They take their responsibilities seriously. We also have the other kind.

    Both the LTC and the union say these guys get no lunch break. Both the LTC and the union should be ashamed. Endless studies have shown alertness declines after four or five hours without food. Drivers need to eat. But if they absolutely must do it on the job, they should eat something they can manage while leaving at least one hand for the wheel.

Here’s opportunity
for the Occupiers
    The Occupy movement’s weakness so far has been its failure to focus. It’s right to damn an obscene gap between rich and poor, but instead of just tenting in parks it needs to denounce specific offences. Ostentatious excess is a place to start: Make conspicuous over-consumption politically incorrect.
    Super-cars are an obvious target. Vehicles capable of speeds more than twice the legal limit should be banned except on the track. Owning them without special permits should be a crime. Anyone walking the street with lock-picks in his pocket and a jimmy up his sleeve is presumed by law to be planning burglary: Anyone on the road in a car that can do 250 kilometres an hour should be presumed to be contemplating driving it at that speed.
    Last week’s multi-million-dollar pileup above (in Japan) involved eight Ferraris, three Mercedes and a Lamborghini, but more often when these luxury speedsters go off the rails they take out some poor devils in a modest family sedan — or a pedestrian or two.
    Decry these things. Urge politicians to outlaw them. Occupy car lots.    

Are all our politicians
heartless racist liars?
    Federal officials are visiting Attawapiskat to assess the need for help in the isolated Cree community on the shore of James Bay. Assess the need? They’ve known the need for decades.
    Three years in a row Attawapiskat has declared a state of emergency and pleaded for outside help. It has people living in uninsulated tents, without heat, hydro or plumbing. Ontario and the feds do as little as possible and haggle over jurisdiction.
    Federal Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Minister John Duncan says he’s taking the crisis seriously but is waiting to be sure that funds already provided are being used effectively. Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne says Ontario’s waiting for Ottawa, but “there haven’t been specific requests or proposals, and that’s why it’s taken some time to get clear as to what needs to happen.”
     Meanwhile there are people have become permanent residents of overcrowded emergency shelters, people using buckets for toilets and oil drums for wood stoves, children still lacking a proper school since theirs was bulldozed 11 years ago as a health hazard.
    And politicians are waiting to find out what needs to happen?
    We airlift vast relief supplies almost immediately to earthquake victims in Haiti and Afghanistan. When Winnipeg has a flood threat — or even when a snowfall spooks Toronto  — we call out the army. But for the neediest among us — the aboriginal people our governments have oppressed, cheated, lied to since Confederation and before — we have only red tape and doublespeak.

Here's a boondoggle blatant enough to drive you to drink

    The Liquor Control Board of Ontario spends a fortune on advertising, despite being a monopoly with a product so popular it really doesn’t need promotion. The contracts are worth millions. Hands up, all those who believe this isn’t a means of shovelling money into the pockets of people who’d look better behind bars than in boardrooms.
    Year after year, government after government, the LCBO puts out one of the glossiest food and drink magazines around, gives them away free though other magazines on the same subject command substantial prices. Week after week, no matter the party in power, the board stuffs your newspaper with expensive, multi-page ad inserts — beautiful photos on thick, glossy paper — extolling wines and spirits with much the same reverence that Tiffany reserves for diamonds. Is any of it necessary? Not a bit. Drinkers will drink without encouragement.
    The LCBO is one of the few government endeavours that actually turns Ontario a profit. It’s a cash cow. But you can bet the taxpayers who own it aren’t the first in line at the teat.

Cycle of stupidity
never seems to stop
    Any large parking lot anywhere is sure to be full of examples of How Not to Do It — louts using spots meant for the handicapped, dolts straddling two spaces at once, boors blocking the fire lanes, and what-have-you. Stupidity isn’t confined to those on four wheels, however. Bicyclists too account for a certain share of the socially retarded.
    Here’s an example of how not to use a bike rack. Rather than being secured at right angles to the rack and taking up one space, as it’s meant to, the machine at left is locked sideways across two. There are cyclists who do this invariably; whether it represents active  malevolence or out of mere ignorance is debatable.
    One argument favouring the second explanation in this instance is that only the frame of the sideways bike is secured to the rack; any passing mischief-maker could have the front wheel off with one twist of the quick-release lever.

Concerts aren’t about where you sit, but what you hear

    By general consensus the music at Wednesday night's viola-piano concert in Aeolian Hall was wonderful, but some in the audience were indignant that the hall was set up cabaret-style, with chairs grouped around tables, rather than in rows. That just wasn't done for classical music, they said; it was disrespectful. Some were quite vehement about it.

    They were wrong.

    Mainly they were wrong on practical grounds. Management had a pretty accurate estimate of how many people were going to show up, and by experience they've established an attendance threshold below which they know that row seating is a bad idea. The number of concertgoers Wednesday night would have been just about sufficient to fill three rows, leaving the rest of the hall embarrassingly empty, but they were enough for a respectable showing when dispersed through the room at attractively clothed and candle-lit tables, where they could stretch their legs as they pleased and sip a glass of something if they liked. A concert that would have been discouraging to performers and audience alike with row seating proved to be comfortable and enjoyable with the alternative.

    Those complaining were wrong too in principle. No rule says classical music must be played only to audiences sitting in rows of fixed seats. Even most of the traditional concert halls in which these are found are also ringed with loges in which patrons can arrange the chairs as they please. Much of the concert-hall repertoire was written to be heard in private salons, in aristocratic dining rooms, even in royal barges floating down the river. The Siegfried Idyll was written to be heard first by a woman asleep in bed. 

    The classics have been performed worthily on piers and promenades, in parks, factories, shopping malls and town squares. To feel that any of those settings constitute an indignity is to forget momentarily the purpose of music.