Toronto: Awful city, awful people

I know Vancouver has one of the mildest climates among cities in Canada, but still, anything made of inverted triangles that requires central heating is ridiculous. And I thought the extension on the museum in Toronto was ugly!

sineed, that is one of the reasons housing co-operatives should be fostered. They do encourage their members to take part in upkeep, greening the neighbourhood etc.

However, they are not right for all low-income tenants. Some people need more support due to various problems, and sadly, the Feds have stopped funding new "public housing units".

Some of us worked for years to get the city and borough to take action against a notorious slumlord here. A balcony of one of his buildings crashed to to ground; mercifully nobody on the balcony or beneath it was hurt or killed.

I like urban living. Of course I don't like expensive living anywhere, as it excludes a lot of us, and a lot of other people.

It really is an ugly, arrogant thing. One needn't share Prince Cholls' very traditionalist and aristocratic (duh) views on architecture and planning to agree with his dismay of the much larger arrogant, ugly buildings infesting London's skyline.

http://www.bigissue.com/features/4340/poundbury-is-prince-charles-dorset...

For all of what Toronto represents to the non-Torontonian, I'm not down with collective rebuke's upon the entire city, unless it involves the moneyed class down on Bay Street.  The good times in Toronto figure most prominently in my mind, and there were many of those.

First Gastown, now the ROM. I certainly heard that a mostrosity was going in at the ROM.

But its there! And oh my god.

I'm not a purist. I like a lot of modernist stuff. And I do design- there are a lot of ways to fit in with the spirit of an existing building, including some pretty counter-intuitive ones. I'm even amenable to allowing that designs are complementary, even if they are not to my liking.

But that thing....

Where is that?

Timebandit wrote:

The ROM is hideous.  Even worse, it's also a bad design for gallery space.

I disagree with the "hideous" part, though it's a matter of taste and we can agree to disagree. However...I took the kids when the crystal first opened. It was jam packed and the dinosaur gallery in particular was full of parents and young children. Many small children discovered that if they got close to the inward-sloping walls, they could scoot along at top speed while their parents remained stuck in the throngs. My kids - young teenagers - and I were bemused by all the parents, wedged tight in the crowds, calling frantically for their giggling spawn, who were running all along the periphery of the gallery where the wall was about two feet high.

So yeah; silly design. It's okay if you visit when it's not crowded and I like all the natural light. But you shouldn't have to worry about bumping your head on a wall when you're walking as upright as the average hominid.

The good news is, though, that you can visit OCAD ("The Hut on Pipecleaner Legs") and if it offend thee, you can just walk another sixty seconds northward and rinse your eyes at Frank Gehry's AGO.

[IMG]http://i58.tinypic.com/20u4fsw.jpg[/IMG]

Note: it's not actually curved like that, nor is Dundas Street.

Is it their clientelle that they have such a low opinion of?

NOW what am I going to do with this brick?

Failing that, I've heard that the best way to roast a duck is stuffed with a brick.  Roast @350F for 4 hours, basting occasionally with pan juices.  Rest for 20 minutes tented with foil.  Discard duck; eat brick.

This seemed like a good place to post this: [url=http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/01/29/toronto-named-best-place-to-l... named best place to live by the Economist[/url].

[quote]

Toronto has been ranked the best place to live in a recent [url=http://safecities.economist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/EIU_Safe_Citi... on urban safety[/url] published by the Economist.

It may not boast a winning hockey team, but Toronto topped a list of 50 cities all measured based on their placement in the Safe Cities Index as well as livability rankings, and three national indexes, including the Democracy Index, Business Environment Rankings and Global Food Security Index.

“Toronto is a consistent performer across the five other indexes, putting it top overall,” the report read. Toronto’s worst performance was in the cost of living category.

Well, now there is a CBC comedy on a shitty place, which isn't Toronto.

Can Renzo and I have Magoo's spare roast duck?

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

Mr. Magoo- doesn't eating the brick cause one to exceed the daily recommended calcium intake?

Yes, but on the good side you'll get so much fibre you'll sh... nevermind, I can't. :)

On the good side? Frankly, Magoo, I doubt the sewer system could handle the results.

Quote:

Can Renzo and I have Magoo's spare roast duck?

What if we split it three ways?

I love duck.  Truth is, the joke is usually told involving a coot, but I didn't want to have to explain what a coot is.

Toronto ranked the best city to live in the world

Toronto has been ranked the best city to live in the world by the Economist. The ranking aggregates Toronto's performance across a range of indexes, which include safety, livability and cost of living. National level rankings like the Economist's Democracy and Global Food Security Index were also factored into the overall rank. So, like, we're the best. Give yourself a pat on the back.

The overall rankings come as part of a new survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranks cities based on how safe they are. According to this report, Toronto is the safest city in North America and eighth-ranked city in the world, trailing Tokyo, Singapore, Osaka, Stockholm, Amsterdam,  Sydney, and  Zurich. The safety index is ranked according to the following criteria: digital security, health security, infrastructure and personal safety.

A reflection on Toronto's awful people?

You can cook the wings - I've done a batch of wing "drummettes" from Le Canard libéré duck shop - but basically you have to poach them in a slow-cooker (or other very slow heat) at least overnight before doing the final grilling. They are very good done that way. Indeed, just roasted or grilled would be impossible to eat, at least for humans.

I bought a turkey leg yesterday - that is, the drumstick and thigh together, quite a size. Very good quality poultry from Fernando - Zinman (these are basically the same company, offspring of the old Zinman poultry on Roy, just of the "Main". That was Central - Eastern European Jewish, of course, though its fame spread far beyond that client base. Nowadays Fernando is Portuguese (and makes great poultry sausages) and Zinman, closer to me, is Italian.

I didn't buy my leg at either of those places, but at the new PA Nature, the "natural foods" grocery opened by Supermarché PA, which is Greek. PA is good, and not expensive, so it is packed. Even their "natural" place is much less extravagant than its rivals (not everything is really organic) and I got some good value.

This of course has nothing to do with Toronto and how awful it is, except perhaps a nostalgia for the Kensington Market area about 40 years ago, when I was VERY young, and that kind of places.

Only to a very limited extent. There were still a few Ashkenazi Jewish places, but by then it was probably more Portuguese than anything else, as was the immediate neighbourhood.

Same here, back then the original Zinman's management was really a holdover, but there were still quite a few Eastern European small shops on St-Laurent ("the Main") some but not all of them were Jewish. I bought pretty scarves in fine wool that were really nice to wear in the seasons between summery wear and thick mufflers.

But we also have this:

A British relative, upon clapping her eyes on this for the first time, remarked, "That is ridiculous! It looks like a licorice All-Sort!" (She also hated the ROM crystal.)

I kinda like how stuffy staid Toronto allowed this.

I dunno, but I'd like a guided tour by both Unionist and lagatta the next time I blow into Montreal!