‘Tis the Season, I Guess

I had been looking forward to walking the Drive and writing my regular Changes on the Drive post as I usually do on the first of each month.  However, for the last couple of days I have had a heavy cold — heavy enough to make typing a chore and a walk outside impossible.  Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend.

The NFL Will Pay A Pedophile For Super Bowl Music

I won’t be watching the Super Bowl; American Football holds as much interest for me as professional wrestling.  However, all of you who do will be helping the NFL pay royalties to convicted pedophile Gary Glitter.

Glitter’s song “Rock and Roll Part Two” is a theme song for the New England Patriots, played after each touchdown.  His music has been banned on British TV and radio since his molestation convictions and even the NFL started using a cover version.  However, as writer he will still receive a huge whack of cash for its use on one of the largest-TV audience shows of the year.

The BBC owns the Super Bowl rights and there is a campaign in the UK to have them black out any use of Glitter’s music.  It would save us all a lot of trouble if the NFL did the right thing and told the Patriots to change their song of choice.

 

Blackberries!

I love blackberries, and I am shocked to be listening to Stephen Quinn on CBC Radio right now describing them as dirty and horrible tasting.  Oh well, more for the rest of us.

The only really good thing about working at my old company in Richmond was that the office was surrounded by wild blackberry bushes.  I used to take containers to work just so I could fill them up on the way home every night.  God they were good.

As write this, the best local place I know for berries is at an old house just a block away from my place.  The house is currently being demolished and the ample bushes are not yet quite ripe. I have my fingers crossed that we can harvest the berries before the developers rip them out!

Happy Birthday Canada!

 

Great Service Deserves A Mention

It is a cliche to observe that we live in a service-saturated era. I would also not be the first to note that most of that service is mediocre at best and truly crap in a lot of cases. It is a joy, therefore, to report on a local craftsman who plies his trade with pride and care.

My wife has a tall metal stand that she uses as a plinth for her tumbler tomatoes. It is very heavy, with four wrought iron legs, each made of several parts. The welds between several of the parts had quite given up — a function of age, no doubt — and the stand was no longer usable.

So, she found Broadway Welding Shop through a Google search and called them because they are just a few blocks from where we live. Twenty minutes after a brief telephone call, owner Nick Byblow knocked on the door to collect the piece. He delivered it back the following morning having renewed all of the welds on the piece, not just those that were obviously broken. He charged $20 and seemed genuinely pleased to accept a tip for the extra work.

If you live on the eastside and have any kind of metalwork that needs repair, we can happily recommend Broadway Welding Shop. Their website is unimpressive; their work is great.

Welcome to The Drive Press!

In anticipation of the publication of my book –  “The Drive: A Retail, Social and Political History of Commercial Drive to 1956” — later this month, we have launched a website for The Drive Press, the imprint under which we are publishing.

Come visit The Drive Press to get up-to-date news on the publication.

 

30 Years After

Happy Birthday Space!

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite.

This was the day that the Space Race was launched as a shocked America threw off its complacency and threw itself into a domination of outer space that would culminate in the Moon landings of 1969.

This was the first precursor to the tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that litter our near-space today.  This was the forerunner of the international communications networks that we now rely on for telephone, television and internet connectivity.

This is one important birthday!

And Then The Blitz Began

The German Luftwaffe attacks against London known as the Blitz began on the afternoon of September 7, 1940 — seventy years ago today.  They went on essentially uninterrupted for 79 days, and expanded across Great Britain.  Here can be found the Guardian‘s report of the first night’s bombing.

The German airmen apparently have orders to loose their bombs whenever they feel they are over the area called Metropolitan London.  Certainly 90% of all the damage done was to non-military objectives.

About 43,000 civilians died during the Blitz. Almost 140,000 more were injured, and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed. Even when the Blitz itself was over, the Germans continued to bomb London  for several years.  My parents spent much of their teen-aged years running to air shelters, sleeping in the Underground stations.  My mother went to the school which suffered the first V2 rocket attack.  Thousands of younger children were evacuated from London to “safer” country towns.  A dozen or more years later, when I was a kid in the early 50s in west London, all my “playgrounds” were bomb sites that still hadn’t been rebuilt.

Those of us who are lucky to live in North America have no conception of what this could be like. Imagine, perhaps, the events of 9/11 happening all over the country every day for two months and more. And all of this just one lifetime away from us.

Time Away

It seems to have been an age since I posted here.  It has been ages since I posted anywhere at all.  I am focusing all my energies on completing a book-length history of Commercial Drive in the 20th century.  This has been a 15-year project so far, but the freedom to write over the last two months has allowed me to know that I can get this finished by summer.  I am currently working my way through a huge body of never previously used research materials and structuring the written work as I go.

If anyone reading this has knowledge of the Drive before 2000, especially family stories that give insight on the way people actually lived, I would welcome any decision to share them with me.  Full acknowledgements will of course be given.

In the meantime, I will keep an eye on this site and post whenever I can.   Thanks for reading!

The International Day of Non-Violence

Ghandi’s birthday

Thought For The Day

Back At Last!

A story with a moral:  When your virus protection software gives you a warning it is about to expire, don’t hesitate!  I did and my hard drive is toast.

We were out of town at wonderful Harrison Hot Springs last week.  I had my laptop with me and got the expiry notice.  I asked it to remind me again in 24 hours, and then I forgot about it.  In the short time between events, it appears a virus crept in and ate up my innards.  I am hoping with every finger crossed that my wonderful computer guy can retrieve at least some of the data on the old drive.   Luckily, I maintain m0st things on a removable drive but I had recently started saving some of the art works on c: for reasons that seem grossly inadequate right now.  Thus, I haven’t been able to post for a few days.  Now, from my office machine, I can at least make my plight public.

What value do these jerks get from damaging my machine, and costing me both money and inconvenience?  Stupid ignorant jerks, is all they are.

Happy Thanksgiving Canada!