You have until March 16 to bid Hello Weather, 1-833-79HELLO, goodbye, as the federal government announced suddenly last month that the cheerily-named phone service and its radio sibling, Weatheradio, will be discontinued.
Find your Hello Weather location code here.
And for posterity, here’s why the federal government thought having weather radio was a good idea.
Yesterday’s online edition of the weekly Journal Pioneer newspaper featured an article from a time traveller who had the results of a party leadership vote that will be held tomorrow, February 7 (see the second paragraph of “NDP has a fresh face at the helm” from page A4). I wish they had also included tomorrow’s winning Lotto 6/49 numbers.
While it seems likely that the new leader of the PEI New Democratic Party will be Thomas Burleigh, as I believe he is still the only declared candidate, I’m guessing it is also possible that someone could be nominated from the floor of their convention, or Thomas could even decide to drop out at the last minute.
The article goes on to point out that the results of the PEI Progressive Conservative party leadership contest, which is also being held tomorrow, “weren’t known when this column was written.” Certainly true.
I read this article early this morning and am writing this post about fourteen hours later, and I still don’t know what to make of it all.
Environment and Climate Change Canada have added colour-coded weather alerts to their weather warning system, similar to what is used in the UK Met Office and many other jurisdictions.
The blurb on the WeatherCAN app explaining what the new alert systems means spoke to me as someone who once had to issue press releases saying the same thing over and over but still somehow make it original enough to catch some news desk jockey’s eye. Bravo!
The YouTube algorithm served me some Sandra-Oh-on-a-talk-show content today and I watched her tell Seth Myers that the first Shakespeare play she did was Love’s Labour’s Lost at theatre school. Oddly enough, I had come across the program from that show a couple of weeks ago as I performed in my current production of the off-Broadway sleeper hit Oh My God, My Mother Is Dead and Why Do We Have So Much Stuff??!!, which has entered its third month of an unlimited run in our basement. I’m starring as the daughter of a woman who bought and saved a lot of stuff, but now that the mother has died, that stuff has to be sorted through and dealt with. The twist is the daughter also has stuff, like boxes of theatre programs, so now she has to deal with her dead mother’s stuff AND her stuff, but mostly she ends up just sitting in the cool basement ignoring what has to be done and looking through boxes of stuff and going “hmmm, look at that.” It’s riveting.
I have no memory of seeing LLL, which I guess was performed the fall after I graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada in May 1991 as these folks were in first year when I was in my final year (I was trained in technical production: lighting, sound, stage management, technical direction, production management, carpentry, etc. I have acted, but am not trained, which was obvious if you ever saw me act.). I remember going back to see the third year students do a show in December, so this must have been on at the same time.
This class was an especially talented group of people and many have gone on to great theatre, TV and film careers. Although I don’t know any of these folks now, it’s still fun to see them pop up in movies or on red carpets or talk shows. Weird, but fun, like my show, which you can catch from now until the basement is empty, which, at this rate, will be never, so you have lots of time, don’t rush.
These were the front two pages of The Guardian newspaper yesterday. It wasn’t a wrapper, as I first assumed, as the back two pages had normal newspaper articles.
The next page also looked like a front page, but the reverse of this page was numbered 4, so it was the third page.
Yes, the front two pages were labelled in small print as paid political advertising, but who paid the bill, and how much did it cost? It’s difficult to take this any other way than a huge endorsement of one federal party over the other. Postmedia could have refused to take the ad, or agreed only to place it further back in the paper. This was a choice. And I’d be as disappointed if it were an ad for the Liberals or any other party.
Deceptive, creepy and mercenary.
As world stock markets hop around in reaction to the US presidents tariff tantrums, be certain that some well-connected folks will be making a lot of money. Pump and dump, market manipulation, a quick whisper at the country club to watch the news on a certain date and time, all nearly impossible to prove.
Thus it has always been, the rich getting richer, but the unethical cruelty of such blatant avarice while cutting lifesaving foreign and domestic aid programs is nauseating. How much do they need? The answer will always be more.
I keep thinking about JP Morgan moving four billion dollars worth of gold bullion to New York in February.
Today is the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere, but you could be forgiven for thinking it was the first day of autumn with all the red maple leaves everywhere.
In response to US tariffs on Canadian goods and increasingly ominous threats of annexation from the US president, many shoppers want to avoid buying things made in the US, so stores and sales flyers are dotted with little leaves to denote items are “Made in Canada” or “Product of Canada”, regulatory distinctions few of us knew about a couple of months ago.
US fresh produce is languishing on store shelves, and Canadian grocery chains are quickly trying to find new suppliers. This means that instead of the Florida and California citrus fruit we have seen in grocery stores for decades, those products are coming to the east coast of Canada from new-to-us places like Turkey, Israel and Egypt.
I have long despaired at seeing things like fresh Peruvian asparagus and Chinese snow peas in my local store, so I can’t say I’m thrilled with this development. I wonder how much of it ultimately gets thrown out, all that effort and fossil fuel spent on transporting garbage around the world.
I hope this new patriotic consumerism will make people consider not only where their products are from but if they need them at all. The climate crisis is still barrelling forward full tilt, and the nonsense coming out of the US is distracting from the real urgency to address this existential issue, which must certainly suit the “drill baby drill” ding dongs.
Stores will continue to sell us things if we continue to purchase them but, as we’ve seen from the rapid switch away from US produce, stores also notice when we don’t buy things.
I’m late to my (mostly) daily readings today. As well as my own book of collected quotes and poems (which I now know is called a commonplace book), my small stack of books at present are:
I have a couple of Mary Oliver books I rotate in and out of my stack. I simply go through the book from one poem to the next, so today’s selection surprised me, reflecting how I’m feeling as I try to ignore the news from the country to the south, a place I don’t understand, and whose leaders I now somewhat fear.
OF THE EMPIRE
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
Mary Oliver
from the book Red Bird, 2008, Beacon Press
I’m not sure my mother has ever been interested in popular culture. I think she was a fan of Perry Como in the 1950s and 60s, but that’s about it for the extent of her fandom. She and I share few – maybe no? – popular culture references. I’m certain she doesn’t know her Paul from her John, George or Ringo; she’s more a Matthew, Mark, Luke and John kind of gal.
The last movie I remember her going to see, one of the handful of movies she went to see in a theatre in a my lifetime, was Chicago. She went with a church social group, and it was an interesting choice for them to have made. My mother was by far the oldest attendee. She had fun, as she always does, but said after that, “she now knew what Sodom and Gomorrah looked like.” Indeed.
You can imagine my surprise when I went to check on my mother after supper tonight. She was watching TV and I asked what was on. She replied, “I’m just catching up on all the Taylor Swift news.” I was beyond amused. Tay Tay hits Toronto tonight and my 102-year-old mother is here for it.