To Be Irish

    In eighteen something or other a blight hit the worlds potato crop. It hit everywhere. The problem with Ireland is the political and social pressures meant that for a painful amount of people potatoes were literally all they had. It was move or die for a lot of people and they did move. The world was introduced to a variety of dynamic world changing minds that brought social justice, unions to protect workers and a lot more besides. 

    I claim a few of those immigrants as my maternal ancestors though I don't know much more than that.  We weren't the sort of family that talked about family tree's or where we came from. I only know that generally a lot of Toronto Irish came from County Cork so that's a possibility.

    I have do have one story. It's that of a woman, a great great grandmother, who went into labor on an English ship. She insisted on being carried to land before giving birth. If she gave birth on the ship legally her child would be English and she wasn't having THAT. 

    Fast forward to this past weekend. St. Patrick's day might have been in the middle of the week but Sunday was when Toronto had the parade.  I'll be making a You Tube of some of what I saw. The link to my you tube is below this text. There was a really big crowd. Its clear the city in general was and probably still is parade deficient.

 

    One of the people there seemed to be warm weather deficient. Let me be clear. It was a nice day maybe 11 or 12 degrees C. That's, I think, upper 40s low 50s F. Someone needs to tell this guy its -dress for the job you want- not - dress for the weather you want-.

    I've actually made use of the Irish wave of immigrants in one of my novellas. 

    Its a ghost story set in a real school located in modern day inner city Toronto.  You can find it on my amazon page.

amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander

    On a side note I will point out most in the crowd still wore masks. I know that the lifting of the mask mandate not withstanding there are still situations when I will mask up. Our over crowded transit system to name but one. Be science smart. Think and if it makes sense mask up. 

Running on Empty

 The world is going to heck in a hand cart and I think most of us are running on empty. Very important point though; that's okay.

Its okay to be worn out from everything that's happened the last couple of years. 

Its okay to wonder if the world has ever been anything but falling apart.

Its even okay to wonder if it was dumb to make fun of those films that taught 50s kids to DUCK AND COVER. 

Now make a cup of tea or grab your caffeine of choice and listen for a minute. 

    I'm not going to stick labels on trauma that's a mine field I'm not qualified to walk through. Unless your reality involves holding out hands to help those running away or on the ground and in the fight its okay to walk away for a bit. See a movie, read, buy some honey because you know a piece of bread and honey late in the day lifts your mood. Or is that last one just me?

    If your reality involves counseling or personally dealing with trauma generations in the making; its okay to take a break from dealing with same and just drift for a bit letting your nervous system get grounded again before the next session of sorting things out. Crap like that does not get fixed all at once.

    Its okay to turn the news off.  This part is very important. Politics and other things that make your left eye twitch will be there tomorrow. 

    Here, think about reading something. There's a hero and a love interest and the action is far away from today's reality. 

There's even other adventures.

amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander 

Whatever you do take a break.

public art

    Its not something that I was that aware of growing up. It certainly wasn't an issue. I'll admit up front that's probably a -white privilege- point of view. That being said its nothing but the truth. When I was a kid that Victorian era statue in the park down town simply registered as a guy on a horse. It was someplace your school trip sat beside so the class could eat their packed lunches before going somewhere else. 

    Time skip and we have protests and riots pulling down statues in the American south. Even in Canada we have protests over statues of politicians that had (unpopular from a modern point of view) views over a great many things that I wont go into here because this isn't that kind of blog.

    Fact is if we take a step away and look at the statues dispassionately as art, most of it just isn't that great. It makes a statement and says THIS PERSON WAS HERE. The people who put the thing up never pictured that others in the future would be saying THIS PERSON WAS ALSO A TWAT. 

    A twat that's boring to look at. Can we have some nice art please. Mind you that's a bit of a mine field on its own. There's a bronze statue in front of Toronto city hall called the Archer. Its by someone named Henry Moor. He was very big in the sixties and seventies. Even back then the thing got a lot of flack from the ordinary man in the street because to be honest it looks less like a archer and more like a couple of pelvic bones trying to fit together at a very odd angle. That being said its interesting and no one is ever going to riot over the thing.

    So here's a suggestion. Teach people in school about the notable persons of the past. That way you can learn their good sides and their not so good sides. Both can be placed in a historical context and understood. Let public squares and spaces in front of government buildings be filled with images of what we want for the future. Or maybe just something interesting to fill the space. 

    

    Mind you I'm not sure this is the best example. Its in front of a condo building down town. To me it looks like a big silver noodle man. The sort that you see in front of car lots with a fan to make them dance around. It is metal and stands four stories tall. It fills the space and its not boring. I guess it will do.

TOKEN BOOK PLUG

If you thought having your teacher bug you to hand in your work on time was annoying, be glad you aren't being pushed to finish by aliens who wont even tell you why they want what they want. Two film students are trying to deal with reality but it feels like someone is playing a game. 

find it at    amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander    

Rome Fell

 This morning I unfriended someone on Facebook. I don't often do that. They were posting the shots from Ukraine of several notable persons including a beauty contest winner all with flack jackets etc and making sneering comments.  Possibly in an effort to be fair and balanced he posted that one of Vlad on the horse with his shirt off but the comment on that seemed slightly less negative somehow. Were they propaganda? Sure, probably. Is Miss Ukraine manning a post shooting at tanks? Who knows. 

Bottom line is it doesn't matter. You don't look down at people using what tools they have while a bully is blowing the shit out of their homeland. 

Lets talk about a book. 

Snap shots is an excellent introduction to the way my mind works. Its a novella sized, collection of very short works; flash fiction and smaller. If you hang out on line long enough you end up writing these for various web sites that post monthly contests. For example; 500 words using a different point of view top three get published. 

Near the end of last year I found I had quite a lot of them so I celebrated the end of a second year of covid by bundling them together. Most are a bit longer than originally written because I went over them and made them a bit more complete but all are still very short. 

Put the Kindle app on your phone and download it. Now that they're starting to lift mask mandates from public transit you're going to want something to hide behind. 

In the mean time someone tell the czar of all the Russias that he can't have the soviet union back. Rome fell and so did the USSR. 

ain't we got fun

 "Every morning, every evening ain't we got fun? 

Not much money oh but honey ain't we got fun?

    Its a song from the first quarter of the twentieth century. I think a guy named Eddy Cantor sang it and the times were pretty dynamic. They just figured out how to put sound on film, records were big and so was radio. Television was a long time and a world war away. 

    It was a depression. A lot of people were homeless. A lot of people were very rich. Unions were tapping companies on the shoulder and saying, "Excuse me can we talk to you about that rich poor thing?" and getting smacked down for their troubles. Frequently that smacking was literal. The Pinkertons didnt make all their money catching bad guys. They also had a bustling side line of demonizing and busting unions. 

    Back to my list; oh yeah; we'd recovered from a plague a little more than a decade before. Someone was declaring that this whole other country in actual fact belonged to his country. Wait a minute. Someone get zombie Churchill a Gravol all that spinning in his grave is making him sea sick. 

    Come to think of it the deja-vu isn't doing me much good either. Lets talk about a book. I crave some escapism.  A lot of my work would be right at home as comics. My not being able to draw tends to eliminate that outlet but I have the stories anyway. 

    This one involved a trio of people living in Toronto who discover that they are a mix of human and alien. This comes out in a growing ability to use a power that comes from their alien side. In the end they decide that they are humans with alien blood not aliens with human blood, confusing the heck out of their spooky baby daddies and outright war happens. 

    They even discover a way to fly. 

    NO CAPES! (you said that in Edna Mode's voice didn't you)

amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander     find it here   

    Remember reading to escape reality isn't rejecting reality its resting between fights. 

Winter Festival

 Some city council in some distant past decided it would be nifty if Toronto had a winter festival in Feb. This is a great idea on the surface of it. Its gray, its cold, its to far from spring, lets just make the best of things. Lets go down town and see the ice sculptures and have a hot chocolate. Great idea; top notch, it even works half the time.

Toronto is a city on the north half of lake Ontario. Because of this we have our own micro climate. This can result in, for example, everywhere around us digging out from a three foot dumping of snow and us getting out the broom to deal with a light dusting.  

February can hand us one of three different climates. Sometimes all in the same week. In general we can get at least a short, one or two day, sometimes week long, melt. It can also have reassuringly normal winter weather, brisk, sunny - nice if you dress for it- winter festival day material. Then there's the February days where the figure the artist is ice sculpting seems to say, "What the heck are you doing out here its freezing!" 

People from Montreal and Ottawa tend to laugh at our relationship to the weather. Talk to a transplanted Montrealer and you will hear in vivid details the depth of the snow drifts they walked through to get to school; in May. Its like talking to your grandparents about walking to school no matter how bad it is out they had/have it worse and coped with it better. 

Mind you Canada does in general have a thing against Toronto.

That's one of the things I played with in this one.  Aliens take Toronto down a peg and several condo buildings go splat. Of course it also has what I think are the most Canadian super hero's yet. They are alien human hybrid's who take control of the powers their alien side give them and defend earth from their army of baby daddies. What could be more Canadian than an interspecies hero flying through the sky on a snow board? 

In the mean time its raining. Which is great until it freezes turning the sidewalks to skating rinks. Tell you what you read this book I'll go write another one. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WF64QZ7/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p2_i1

My Saturday

 I went to the movies last Saturday. I picked a theater in the north half of the city so I would avoid the (WE DON'T WANT TO GET A NEEDLE) truck fest down town. Instead of that I ended up with a subway closure and shuttle buses. Not a big deal I thought, I'd allowed a lot of time to get there. Helping things I got a bus almost right away and it wasn't crowded. 

Annoyingly what that bus also was, besides not crowded, was a new home to my back pack. I realized it was not on my back as I was walking into the mall where the theater was located. It was empty with the exception of an old thumb drive. There was a time when I used to stuff  thumb drives in every nook and cranny just in case the worst happened. At least I'd have my work on the drive. Then I discovered the CLOUD. 

I'd brought the bag along in the interests of picking up a few things after the show. It takes a couple of days for lost items to find their way to the lost and found so I'll drop by the place Saturday and see if it turned up. In the mean time I bought a new one. Its much nicer, sturdy and was bought in an independent store.  

At any rate I had a nice Wendy's lunch and saw my movie;  The Kingsman prequel. Its well done with lots of characteristic over the top fight scenes and sets up the rest of the films very nicely. I give it a 4 our of 5 stars. 

I left the mall feeling very good in spite of my lost bag. That good mood slid straight into energetic annoyance. The mall is right across the street from a spot called North York City Center. In the days before Toronto and its surrounding cities were forcibly amalgamated by the province in the interests of saving money ( Spoiler alert it didn't.) this was the city hall for North York. The entire long block was isolated by the police and two big trucks were parked in front of the big public square. 

This meant that not only was I going to have to take a shuttle bus but I would have to walk several blocks to get said bus. I ended up walking down to the nearest subway stop and taking a different bus following a different way home. 

I'm told the big babies are going to hit us up with another display this coming weekend. Someone explain to these twits that a virus is not political and doesn't care about anyone's freedoms. Get the damn shot or kiss profitable runs across our southern border good bye. Even if we eliminated the requirements the US isn't going to drop theirs. They'd just send you home. 

The up side is since Christmas I haven't done much on my You Tube and I was able to make this. 

Stay warm. I read a thing the other day that said its only something like seven more Saturdays till spring. I am very very ready for that.