“I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of ‘explaining’ them.”
(Nodding in the comments)
I hadn't really thought about the risks of making yourself The Bad Object to the most unhinged people in the world
Mr. Onion willingly accepting those risks in order to turn something incredibly vile and cancerous into something extremely silly is beautiful
Saying "no man, you don't get to win this time" to evil people who have the power of the entire corrupt government behind them has to feel pretty fucking good
Doug Ford - who has taken over 8 school boards claiming fiscal mismanagement - is selling his new $28.9M private jet. Why the sudden change of heart?
"I think it was the fact that Ontarians were flooding his cell phone and his MPP offices with complaints.” - Marit Stiles
Keep calling: 416-325-7635
Yes pollen allergies are getting worse!
No it's not because of sexism!
It's because of climate change!
It would be cool if we could focus on fixing THAT, instead of chasing our tails with botanical sexism!
Someone at the NYT asked me a couple years ago for an opinion piece on "how to solve the Colorado River water crisis."
So I made a nice little writeup on the most obvious answer: charging for water.
Once the editorial board saw it, they freaked out & cancelled the piece.
There’s THUNDER and snow?!
Not this again. April weather is wild!
Cool. My electric mixer stirs faster than my finger
It’s like the first time I encountered a whole room full of Rothko paintings and burst into full sobs.
Some things are not understood via language. That episode was powerful, and her paintings…
That’s what I thought might be unfolding in her fantastic new story. The impossibly beautiful colours…
This is a beautifully-told story and it absolutely made me cry every time I listened to it.
But I loved it. It so intensely illustrates the humanity in art and music, the meaning beyond language (and I loved language but also know the limits). It just got too close, in the last decade.
Ah, I knew we were in agreement but text failed me - we are all fans here, I see.
I should explain what made me jump to to that conclusion. It was one of my favourite Radiolab episodes before dementia got to be too painful a topic for me.
podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/u...
Indeed, and as a (n Edward) Gorey fan as well, I love the description. I loved A House with Good Bones, The Twisted Ones, the Sworn Soldier books, the very scary Hollow Places.
It’s just that this one… got a little close for me when I THOUGHT I saw a “losing one’s mind” horror in the works.
Wow!
Like, I know they’re blue, but I usually see them in treetops with difficult lighting… and I forget how very blue they can be. Stunner!
Oh, I’ll definitely be back this week to walk the other half of the park. I adore spring beauty and I rarely see it anywhere else, though I often spot trout lilies and mayapples in other forested places around the creek or by the lake. And the possibility of thrush song… 🤩
Birds I heard, some I also saw, on my walk around the woods:
Downy, hairy, and red-bellied woodpeckers
Flicker
Robin
Song and white-throated sparrow
Junco
Hermit thrush (calling only, no song)
House finches
Ruby-crowned kinglet
Chickadee
Red-winged blackbird
Camera-shy garter snakes who I spotted when I heard them rustle the leaf litter.
A whorl of lungwort leaves - silver-spotted green leaves.
Lungwort blooming, one flower bluish- purple, another pinkish-lavender, with trout lilies behind it.
A tight cluster of tiny, green, round first leaves of jewelweed.
Yellow fringy-petaled coltsfoot flowers.
Other colours spotted on the path once I was past the boardwalks:
silver spotted, pink and purple flowering lungwort, the first leaves of your forest friend, spotted jewelweed plants, and the pretty but invasive yellow coltsfoot flowers who grow in the wettest spots.
Mo Willems live action is crazy
A trillium plant, leaves only, tiny as it likely just emerged from the ground.
A trillium plant with a green nodding bud coming out from between 3 partially unfurled leaves. The bud is pale, likely a white flower but hard to be sure.
A trillium plant with its dark burgundy bud nodding over open leaves, the sepals open to reveal the tight red flower inside. Trout lilies dot the ground behind it, in a blur.
Another nodding red trillium bud, lighter in colour and with other plant leaves sticking out underneath.
The stars of this forest (though not my favourites, the spring beauty which grows in the beech-filled south section which I missed this time) - the trilliums are only just beginning to show up. Several were just leaves like the first photo, but the other 3 here were all around a single large tree.
A dark, muddy path through the leaf-covered forest floor where several large trees wear green skirts around their roots.
A single trillium plant sticks up through leaf litter amongst brown-purple shoots of blue cohosh.
Blue cohosh leaves unfurling, some drab green and others more reddish-brown like their stems. There are many such plants in this spot.
A single dark blue cohosh plant growing amidst trout lilies, its leaves not yet unfurled and a single pale yellow flower atop one leaf stem.
Muddy paths and spring greens… plus the oddly visible but hard-to-capture-in-focus delight of the spring ephemerals, blue cohosh. Among them, a tiny three-leafed trillium plant unfurling in the light.
It’s snowing.
Is that really…
Yup. Snow.
Trout lilies in full bloom among leaf litter and fallen logs. They have nodding banana-shaped flowers with petals curled back to reveal orange stamens, all over the distinctive spotted leaves.
A trout lily bloom seen from below, with treetops a blur high above.
A sneak peek at the stunning yellow that will carpet the forest floor in the next few days (after a few very cold nights we’re in for).
I found this one early blooming cluster in a warm place.
A large opening in the woods with young saplings dotting the area where older trees had fallen. The ground is covered in leaf litter and spotted with many spring ephemerals breaking through, mostly trout lilies.
A nodding trout lily bloom among a carpet of lilies just beginning to open, it’s hanging yellow petals with reddish stripes on the outside hanging down like banana peels.
A trout lily in bloom, its yellow petals open and several curled back. There is another bud nearly open beside it.
Another trout lily bloom seen from a different angle to show the bright yellow inner flower and the purple-spotted leaves.
The woods open up in several areas where trees have fallen. I had hoped to find at least one trout lily in bloom somewhere sunny, and naturally here is where I found them. Hello, yellow!
The drunken meanderings of a mourning cloak butterfly, the ones who sleep through winter in the leaf litter under snow. Lovely things, hard to follow!
Flicker calling, sparrows and robins singing are nearly drowned out by the hum of traffic just beyond the trees.
A trout lily bud, held horizontally out between spotted leaves among a cluster of lilies in leaf litter.
Blooming bloodroot by a fallen branch among a carpet of trout lily leaves.
The sun popped through a few more times, making it warmer in the woods. I wondered if I’d find any trout lilies in bloom, as I spotted the odd bud looking ready to open. Small bees buzzed the bloodroot flowers.
Spring starts low, bringing green to the earth before it moves up into shrubs and then treetops. As I admired the carpet of trout lilies, I heard so many woodpeckers: downy drumming, hairy chattering, flicker calling, & red-bellied “quirr, quirr” heard here over the loud highway traffic nearby.
Oh yes… especially here, in the northern section of this wet maple-beech woods. There’s lots of places in ravines throughout Toronto to see spring ephemerals, but for trilliums and spring beauty? I go west to Cawthra Woods.
Doubles? They must be so pretty!
A tightly wrapped mayapple plant with its umbrella leaf curled around itself and popping up between trout lily leaves.
A tiny mayapple leaf among trout lilies leaves - it looks like a partly opened umbrella, pale green and with lobes so it looks like separate leaves from this angle.
The beginnings of mayapples, which will be showing up as large carpets around the woods soon, just stick up like bullet-head spears before opening their umbrella leaf.
