Toronto is one of the worst cities I know of to be a pedestrian in. It's my biggest grief about living here — how hostile the city's design, laws, and processes are unless you're in a car. I walk a lot, hours ever day, and cannot tell you how often I see drivers run red lights, ignore crosswalks, or use bike lanes as passing lanes or parking spaces. It is literally every single day if not every single walk.
There is a street near my house, Parkside Drive, which has numerous pedestrian fatalities. The speed camera on that street generates more revenue for the city than any other, yet every day people run red lights on it and the city does nothing.
Someone in Vancouver came up with this crosswalk hack, which is ingenious. We need these on every corner.
I've never been a Radiohead fan, but I do quite like Marissa Nadler. Her cover of No Surprises is lovely (as are all of her covers) and this fan-made video by Kai-Duc Luong for the track perfectly captures the mood of the song:
If that mood agrees with you, you'll also dig Yelena Yemchuk's video for The Dove and the Wolf's Springtime.
If you enjoyed the Nadler and want more, my favorites are Ghosts & Lovers and Thinking of You.
Fantastic info and accompanying video footage of a Robin and their chicks.
Anecdote Alert
One morning, while hiking with my dog, I crossed Parkside Drive to enter Toronto's High Park when something in the sky drew my attention. It was a bird, but it wasn't flying; it was falling, and it hit the ground, hard. It was a Robin, choking on a worm.
I scooped it from the road before a car could squish it and I slowly pulled the worm from its throat. I waited while the bird lay motionless on its side. A few seconds passed and it regained consciousness, slightly stunned. It looked at me and I at it and we sat there for a moment, both of us thinking: Well, that was something!
The bird started to hop but seemed reluctant to fly. It took cover in some brush and stood there, looking at me. I picked up the worm and laid it near the bird, waiting to see if it would eat it again, but it didn't. It just stayed there, blinking. I imagined it was experiencing satori.
I rose, and Shakedown and I continued our walk.
That was four years ago, but I think of that bird every day because I pass that same stretch of road daily.
I like birds. I've always liked them. There is a Heron that watches over me called Gilgan that I've seen in six countries in one form or another. One day, I'll have a her tattoo'd on the top of my left hand. Two years ago, I swiped right on a Tinder profile because of a woman named Wren. It was a small movement, but one of the most impactful in my life, for we became great friends. Before meeting her, the word Wren summoned Auguries of Innocence, which I always incorrectly recall as "He who'd harm the little Wren / Can never be a friend of men."
Of course, the poem also mentions the robin:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage ...
This is a question from the smash-hit 80s board game Trivial Pursuit. My family played it often and one time this was the winning question for me. I concentrated as best I could, trying to decide. I'd seen plenty of robins, but I have minor aphantasia, meaning I cannot create moving pictures in my mind's eye. Think! How do robins move?
The sand in the timer was running out, so I figured I'd just guess and have a 50/50 chance of winning.
"Hop," I said.
My stepbrother-in-law, who was a monster of a man, was delighted to tell me I'd got it wrong. He showed me the card. The answer was Yes.
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Walz made a bot that crawled Youtube in search of these videos and found five million of them. You can watch them, in seemingly random order, at IMG_001.
In a remote desert town in Australia, population two, a couple manages an emergency airport and keeps vacant cottages in pristine condition, waiting for visitors who never seem to arrive.
A while back, I posted Towers of Silence, which features vultures, and today this video popped up on my feed. Lovely little story with some close-up vulture footage giving a perspective I'd never seen before. Short, just a couple minutes long, but covers vulture romance, arthritis, stem cell surgery, and more.
Cabel Sasser, one of the co-founders of Panic, makers of Playdate (and many other things), gave this delightful talk at the most recent (and final) XOXO. If you watch it here on the embed, jump to 3:55 on the timeline to get to the talk, proper, and then watch to the end.
Delightful, yes? It gets better, because Sasser has created a website for Wes Cook's art. You can see it here.
