Category Archives: My life

Insights on how I got here

Thank you

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Varied of tradition, but singular in purpose.

Varied of tradition, but singular of purpose.

I just walked to the grocery store without a second thought beyond wondering whether milk would be on sale or if I could get there and back before it started to rain.

Thank you.

Last night, friends and I filmed puppetry vignettes in which we satirized recent political events and social attitudes, laughing freely and openly.

Thank you.

On Saturday, I met a friend for bacon sandwiches and then walked home along the beach, smiling at kids playing in the sand and dogs excitedly greeting each other.

Thank you.

Today, my biggest concern is whether I will get off my backside and walk two blocks to change my cellphone carrier or if I’d rather just bitch about the one I am presently using.

Thank you.

My home hasn’t been destroyed. I’m not worried about my next meal. My family hasn’t been slaughtered. No one will kick in my door because I made a joke online. And you and I can completely disagree on local, national and world politics and social trends.

Thank you.

And even with all that, five “thank yous” is not nearly enough to express my gratitude to the men, women and families who have sacrificed everything so that all of the above is true.

I live in Canada. It is Memorial Day in the United States. And none of that matters. The international boundary does not make any of what I have written less true.

We may choose different days and express our feelings in different ways, yet we have but one purpose: gratitude.

Thank you.

From Ottawa's Parliament Hill to Washington's National Mall to France's Vimy Ridge, we must never forget and always be grateful.

From Ottawa’s Parliament Hill to Washington’s National Mall to France’s Vimy Ridge, we must never forget and always be grateful.

Tanked at the aquarium

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I recently signed up for a 3-week photography workshop at Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada in Toronto, which basically means running around gob-smacked at coral reefs, sharks, jelly fish and kilometer after kilometer of living colour.

Here are some picks from Week 2.

Assumption of malevolence

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Good

As I sat at a picnic table near the boardwalk along Lake Ontario, I watched parents pushing children in strollers, local residents walking dogs and chatting, and a squirrel accost me for my choice in sandwiches (seems he preferred nuts over chicken).

It wasn’t long, however, before the gentle peace of wind and waves was broken by an angry tone.

“Hey! Your dog left a package back here!” shouted a woman to people further along the boardwalk.

“Sorry?” came the gentle query.

“And let’s just say it’s a present I wouldn’t want to step in,” the angry woman shouted while mimicking the slide of sneaker on grass.

“He did?” the other woman questioned, turning back down the boardwalk.

“Yeah! You want to get back here and pick up after your dog,” the first woman barked. “It’s over there behind the bench.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see him do it.”

“Of course not! You were too busy talking to your friends,” the woman sniped as she stormed across the park to some other destination.

The dog owner reached the bench, and after a few moments of searching, bagged the offending substance and rejoined her friends.

Poop

I appreciate that dog dirt litters our parks and streets and beaches, and that the angry woman was fed up with this happening in her neighbourhood.

And based on the demeanour and response of the accused (woman, not the dog), I am confident that this was not a typical dump-and-run, but rather an innocent oversight.

Sadly, rather than assume any degree of innocence, the angry women immediately jumped to an assumption of malevolent or at least willful ignorance.

She could have approached dog owner calmly with “Excuse me, but your dog seems to have left something behind that you may not have seen.”

Instead, she attacked with a tone that suggested the dog owner herself left the steaming pile.

At least in North America, there seems to be a growing trend to assume malevolent intentions before acknowledging the possibility of innocent ignorance or unfortunate stupidity.

Are there malevolent self-centred people in the world? Certainly.

But should that be our default assumption about anyone who slights us or causes us discomfort?

If the answer is yes, then I want out of this society. It has become too angry for me and I have no desire to be victimized by it.

I wish both of the women in this story well.

Mostly birds at the beach

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After a few hours of radiation sickness (aka sunshine) wandering the boardwalk and nearby woods along Lake Ontario, I managed to get a really good shot of the evasive red-winged blackbird.

I say evasive simply because this particular species would much rather spend its time strafing my head than sit still for me to take its picture.

Enjoy.

Fight to stay positive

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despair

I try to stay positive;

I try to stay upbeat,

As I watch cities aflame

And walls crumble earthward,

Whether through acts of Man

Or through acts of Nature;

Man destroying man,

Betraying them,

Slaying them,

Playing them,

For personal advance

Or simply fear of change.

 earthquake

I try to stay positive;

I try to stay upbeat,

As I hear voices raised,

Weapons of metal, wood, stone,

Wielded in white-knuckled fury;

The bastions of knowledge,

A cultural cudgel used to

Oppress them,

Compress them,

Divest them

Of their worldly goods,

Lives covetously shattered.

 APTOPIX Suspect Dies Baltimore

I try to stay positive;

I try to stay upbeat

As I watch Nature be raped,

Shorelines and shorebirds

Tarred for their feathers;

Ivory affectations shorn

From faces yet breathing;

Air given cancerous substance,

Stilling them,

Killing them,

Willing them

To the precipice of extinction,

Silent hillsides the new norm.

 rhino with no horne

I try to stay positive;

I try to stay upbeat,

Hope my only option

In a world angry and mad.

We must heed the cries,

Must all feel the pain,

Must all see the anguish,

Lest the sweet sleep of death

Numb our senses forever.

And we must stay positive,

We must all stay upbeat.

anguish_zps775f09d74

Shhh…the Toronto Marlies made the playoffs

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hurray

My beloved hometown Toronto is often described as “hockey-mad”, and as home to the Hockey Hall of Fame and one of the most legendary franchises in National Hockey League history—the Toronto Maple Leafs—you might think that makes sense. The epithet hockey-mad is, however, a lie.

Toronto is not hockey-mad, it is Maple Leafs-mad.

In fact, it is now Maple Leafs-livid because yet again, the big team has failed to make the Stanley Cup playoffs and so my fair city will go a 48th consecutive year without a championship.

Still legendary, but for entirely the wrong reasons.

But while the local news media are filled with stories about what the woeful Toronto hockey fans will do as the Leafs players take to the golf courses, they are completely overlooking one local professional hockey team that has made the playoffs—for the fourth consecutive season.

I speak of my beloved Toronto Marlies, the American Hockey League farm team of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Nary a word. Nary a reporter. No pictures. Doesn’t exist.

Star sports coverage

The team is covered by bloggers whom I respect:

But otherwise, silence.

Mark (facing us) came all the way from the UK to watch the Marlies play. Toronto sports reporters, not so much.

Mark (facing us) came all the way from the UK to watch the Marlies play. Toronto sports reporters, not so much.

To address this short-coming, I have started a campaign with other Marlies fans to bombard the local media with news and highlights of what is happening in Toronto playoff hockey. My first missive is below:

Playoff hockey in Toronto

Over the past week, I have read two stories in the Sports Section of the Toronto Star describing what playoff-starved Torontonians can do now that the Maple Leafs have hit the golf links. Woe is Toronto in the absence of playoff hockey.

And yet, Toronto will play host to professional playoff hockey, and by players proudly sporting blue and white maple leaves. I am, of course, speaking of the Toronto Marlies, the farm team of the moribund Toronto Maple Leafs.

You see, as the ACC has sat deathly quiet, the Ricoh Coliseum just a little way down Lakeshore Boulevard has been rocking night after night as the Marlies rescued a terrible season start and turned it into a rollicking run back into the Calder Cup playoff race.

Last night, with a loss by the Hamilton Bulldogs and a win by the Marlies, Toronto’s boys in blue clinched their fourth consecutive playoff spot, and over the next two days, could see themselves sit anywhere from 6th to 8th in the AHL Western Conference.

And how did the boys do in their previous runs at the Calder Cup? Three years ago, they reached the championship finals, only to fall to the juggernaut that was the Norfolk Admirals. Last year, they were within 22 minutes of advancing to yet another Calder Cup final, but fell to the ultimate champion Texas Stars.

Sure, everyone was disappointed that the boys didn’t bring home the Cup, but in a city that is used to switching allegiances in April, touting a hockey team as Conference Finalist and Cup Finalist is pretty heady stuff.

With the house-cleaning planned up the road at the ACC, the Marlies have never had a greater importance to the Maple Leafs. The boys I watch on a weekly basis are the future of the big squad. Rookie scoring champion Connor Brown. Future phenom William Nylander. Tomorrow’s goaltending duo Christopher Gibson and Antoine Bibeau. Former Defenceman of the Year TJ Brennan. I can keep going.

So as your readers bemoan being unable to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars taking in one Leafs playoff game, they should know that they can come down the road a bit (plenty of parking) and bring the whole family (for a fraction of the price) to cheer the Marlies as they march into Calder Cup competition.

I’ll be cheering the boys. My friends will be cheering the boys. Come on down. We’ll give you a warm welcome!

Go Marlies, Go!

Wish me (and the Marlies) luck.

playoffs

Lake Ontario

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While waiting for Windows to update my computer (ugh), I was left without my laptop and so decided to take advantage of the springtime weather (finally!!!) and nearby beach to do a bit of photography in east Toronto.

Left-handed (DNA) compliment

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While attending the surprise birthday party for a friend in the sciences, I noticed he owned a coffee mug from a group called Life Sciences Career Development Society based at the University of Toronto. Actually, to be more accurate, what caught my eye was the DNA double-helix on the mug…and the fact that it was wrong.

Wrong

BOOM! My head explodes.

As someone with biochemistry & genetics degrees who has written about the life sciences for ~15 years, this seemingly innocuous error drives me crazy. This must be how copy editors feel when they see a misused semi-colon (and I’m sorry about that).

right v wrong

For the non-biochemists, through a characteristic known as chirality (look it up…too hard to explain here), the typical DNA double-helix in human cells—the famous Watson-Crick-Franklin structure or B-DNA—has a right-handed helix. This means that if you could see the double-helix (above) and let your fingers follow along the curve of one side as it wraps around the other, you could only do this comfortably with your right hand.

You can see that in an example of a single helix that curves either to the left (left) or the right (right).

handed

Unfortunately, somewhere in the mists of science illustrations time, an artist drew the double-helix of DNA in the wrong direction and that double-helical abomination has perpetuated ad nauseum, including irritatingly enough, in science publications and scientific logos such as a recent health article in the Toronto Star (image below), the cover of a sci-fi novel and the LSCDS logo.

DNA - backwards

And if I only saw this in 50% of the images, I’d be irritated but probably not the raving loony I am now. But no, this freak of nature is everywhere. The correct right-handed DNA illustration is the anomaly.

So why does this matter? Maybe it doesn’t, and I am just a raving loony.

Certifiable loony!

Certifiable loony!

But for me, I struggle with what else might be wrong in a life science or healthcare story if they can’t get the DNA helix right. Do I trust the math of an investment planner who doesn’t know that four quarters equals one dollar?

Luckily, the fix is an easy one. Simply mirror the image you have (not turn it upside down) and the left-handed double-helix becomes a right-handed one. (In a mirror, your actual left hand looks like a right hand.)

So, medical illustrators everywhere, please fix your catalogues of scientific illustrations. My head can’t take too many more explosions.

So much better

Nerves already calming.

[Also, from a design perspective, up and to the right is more palatable for North American audiences as it implies future success (e.g., rising value). Has nothing to do with handedness, here.]

For the more biochemically savvy:

Yes, there is left-handed DNA, which is also known as Z-DNA. But as you can see from the illustration below, its structure is significantly different from the smooth-flowing curves of B-DNA (and the equally unusual A-DNA).

Two rights don't make a left

Two rights don’t make a left

You are your own inspiration

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An actor friend recently expressed “I don’t wanna” about leaving town for an upcoming gig. I assumed it was less about fearing the gig and more about leaving home, but I wanted to let her know it wasn’t about wanna or even hafta.

Enjoy.

dream