What has happened to manners in this city?
I took the subway to work one snowy day last week. Now I remember why I never take the TTC.
Not only do men or young people not give up their seats to older women, they run you down trying to get to the seat first. You start to get grumpy yourself and vow never to let it happen again. Then you get assertive, and aggressive. Before you know it, you’re trampling people underfoot yourself. I’m starting to understand the origins of road rage.
Please, everyone, show some kindness. Some class. Some elegance.
One family even pulled their kid right in front of me so they got a seat that was becoming vacant instead of me. Good Lord! What message does that send youngsters?
T
There is something so sweetly poignant about late blooming roses.
When other summer flowers have perished, the brave roses keep flowering, their heavy blooms tossing in the fall winds.
They are the last small flashes of pastel colours in a world turned red, yellow and gold by the fading autumn light. They nod their heads as a reminder of the warm summer days past – yet somehow a harbinger that a wintry blast is just around the corner.
You know some time soon you will look out of your window and there will be snow on the leaves. Those soft petals will be frosted hard. And winter will be here once more.
There are a couple of good movies amid the trash out there.
The Duchess is an English movie, a period piece that is quite brilliant in skewering the foibles and m ores of the British upper class in the late 18th century.
It is a true story of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. She is a beautiful almost child bride. He is an ugly old goat. He is powerful, she is not. She invites her best friend to live with them and the duke ends up sleeping with her. It becomes a menage a trois, with the duke living openly with two women. He is basically a bigamist. She becomes involved in Whig politics of the time and Charles James Fox. When she takes another man, it is quite another matter. Great stuff. Should win an Oscar, but won’t. It is way too good.
The other clever movie is the comedy Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais and Tia Leone. Great, understated, subtle British humour. Not everyone gets Gervais out-there stuff. At times I was the only person guffawing in the movie theatre. Some priceless lines. Not to be missed if you enjoyed the original British The Office series. MmmMmmm good.
Who said the younger generation can’t do math?
I was just in the Bay at Scarborough Town Centre. The young lady who served me at the ladies hosiery counter (I think her name was Saheya) not only outsmarted the computer, she insisted on revising my bill – downwards.
The mix and match special on tights didn’t ring in. Then it only rang in at 35% instead of 40%. Not only did this young woman catch the discrepancy, she patiently went through ten items to make sure every one of them was rung in accurately. And then she gave me back the $1.72 the computer had overcharged me.
Good for her! I’ve been in stores when clerks couldn’t make change from a $20 bill. Not just that, she was very polite. Same at the Guerlain counter. The lady there went out of her way to make sure I got exactly what I was looking for.
Good service is so rare in a department store that it deserves kudos when it happens.
It’s funny how people are gleefully rubbing their hands together and pointing to the $700 billion bail-out of banks as evidence that capitalism doesn’t work.
What happened in the U.S isn’t true capitalism. It’s greed gone mad.
Look at how the Toronto Sun started and you will see capitalism at its best. A bunch of people got together and through their creativity, intelligence and foresight put out a product that was hugely successful and made money.
The bosses at the time – Peter Worthington, Doug Creaighton and don Hunt – realized that the people who got them there were the workers, so they shared the loot. When the Sun first went public, they gave all the original employees shares, so they could benefit from all their hard work.
That is true capitalism. People work hard and are rewarded.
What is a perversion of capitalism is when companies get flipped from one owner to another, often at inflated prices and senior executives get leveraged buyouts. Many of those execs haven’t put an ounce of their creativity into the company. The people who did the work and produced the produce are far below them. And they’re the ones who get laid off when the company is sold – at an inflated price. And the new owner discovers they weren’t making the kind of dough they expected to make.
That’s false capitalism built on greed, and it’s the kind of false capitalism that is killiing the U.S. right now.
t
So TTC drivers don’t want to be tested for drugs and alcohol – citing privacy reasons.
My safety trumps your privacy every time. Enough said.
Who knew I was such a financial genius? Here I was genuflecting to all these great finacial thinkers with their bafflegab doublespeak and their condescending airs and graces.
And guess what? They’re so stupid, so greedy, so completely valueless that the U.S. government has to bail them out to the tune of $85 billion.
I, on the other hand, manage my finances conservatively. I live within my means and I pay off my bills at the end of the month. Turns out the government doesn’t have to nationalize me.
That makes me a financial genius compared to all those boneheads who’ve been paid all those massive bonuses to undermine the entire free market system.
Somehow though, I don’t think you’ll be seeing them moving into modest homes in Scarborough any time soon. Wouldn’t mind seeing them move in with Conrad Black though.
Orange jumpsuits are so attractive on a swindler.
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Went to see Brideshead Revisited … the movie … at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Massachusetts this week.
It was the perfect eccentric place to watch a perfect eccentric movie. Of course, we are all going to compare the movie not so much with Evelyn Waugh’s novel, but with the earlier TV miniseries. Sad, really.
The movie held up well, though, and in many ways was more faithful to Waugh’s original intention for the book. It is NOT, repeat NOT, a love story. It is about faith and redemption.
While it is set in pre-war Britain in an upper class family, it forces all of us to do some introspection, to look into not just our hearts, but our souls, to see what depths are or aren’t there.
Of course, there is a great temptation to compare this movie with the brilliant 1981 BBC miniseries. They were both filmed at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, for example, which clearly must seem the most Bridesheady place around.
Who can forget Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder in that series? Still, Matthew Goode does a good job and the movie makes a much better point-counterpoint between him and his father.
I still think that Anthony Andrews was unforgettable as Lord Sebastian Flyte in the miniseries. The beautiful boy became a shockingly dissolute alcoholic/drug addict. I didn’t see that in the Ben Whishaw characterization, although he did do a remarkable job.
All the same, a darned good movie and much better than I expected. Ignore those people who tell you it is long and convoluted and blah blah blah. I spent three butt-numbing hours at the recent Batman movie. Now there’s a show I could have skipped with pleasure. Three hours I’ll never get back in my life.
I am so tired of Hollywood. In fact, I think the whole of the mainstream movie business has completely lost touch with what art is all about.
If the Oscar judges really think that No Country For Old Men is the movie of the year, then the entire industry is in trouble.
Meanwhile, every so often you find a hidden gem like Son of Rambow, a sweet movie that works on many levels. A textured yarn, with good characterization and a complex plot.
Went to see it at the Cineplex on Carlton Street, too. What a difference that makes. Instead of crunching popcorn underfoot, you can actually get a glass of wine before the movie. Okay, you can’t take it into the show. That would be way too civilized for Toronto. But a step in the right direction. Finally a movie you come out of feeling you’d been entertained.
Go see this wonderful ballet, now playing at the Four Seasons Centre in toronto. Performed by the Alberta Ballet, the dance is set to the poweful music of Jodi Mitchell. She was at last night’s show, which got a standing O.
Sure, the greaet classical ballets are great. But sometimes it is wonderful to get away from the tutus and the whole big orchestra thing to get into something that is more relevant to today. The choreography was superb. Very simple – in appearance, anyway. But very effective.
Christina Blizzard 