I didn’t watch Piper and Paul’s bronze medal skate live. I would have been too nervous anyhow. I came home, checked the results on Jackie Wong’s Rocker Skating twitter, immediately started crying, then cried my way through the routine on CBC’s replay.
That night I watched the entire rhythm dance with commentary by Carol Lane (Piper and Paul’s coach) and Kurt Browning. It was very sweet hearing Carol’s in the moment reaction to their brilliant skate, especially after such a difficult season.
For me, having watched every single skating competition since September, this was an unbelievably happy result. Who cares about the colour of the medal. “Vincent” started out the season very poorly; it was slow and choppy. Piper and Paul looked like they had ‘lost a step’, as they say in sports. I am overjoyed that they worked so hard to get it all back.
It brought back a lot of memories of the 2024 World Championships we attended in Montreal. After Piper and Paul completed their incredible skate to Wuthering Heights, Paul was also quite emotional. But not like this.
March 2024Piper and Paul’s best program ever, in my opinion.
Finally!! We didn’t mean to do this today but ended up checking out the new LRT. Strangely, we started at Bloor and Dufferin, took the 29 north to Fairbank Station, travelled eastbound to Kennedy, then back home via line 2.
Val’s connection to the LRT has finally come full circle. Back in June 2013 he was at the launch of the western tunnel boring machine because he, along with five or six others, had won a competition to name the machines: Don Humber. A few photos from that day SO far back show the depth of the tunnel (now evident from the long escalators going down to the stations), Val with the TMB, and his scratchy signature.
Who knew a book about urban evolution could be so amusing? I would have said not me, but I must have had an inkling because I picked this book off the remainders table at my local Book City. Likely it was my interest in Darwin that captured me. I’m a sucker for naturalists’ writing, too, as evinced by my steady stream of recently read books on birds and octopuses.
Menno Schilthuizen’s easy to understand and humourous 2018 book, Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, provides a great overview of the numerous ways evolution is occurring in cities around the world. As usual for a book chosen by me, there are plenty of bird examples; house crows in Singapore and the Netherlands, parakeets in Paris and London, even the so-called finches in the Galapagos Islands that are continuing to evolve because of the influx of tourists: note, they are apparently not even finches. There are also the unfortunately named turdus species: blackbirds. Let alone the milk-bottle opening tits in the UK that have found ways to get at the cream at the top of delivered milk bottles, and the carrion crows in Japan that open walnuts by going to busy intersections where cars run them over. Fancy tool use!
Animals are not just ingenious because of their brains. Their brains are ingenious because certain genetic traits have been selected by nature/evolution. There are seemingly simple examples related to the colours of moths in industrialized cities (the darker the better to camouflage them in sooty settings) and complex examples such as the moths that are attracted to lights and their city relatives that may be less attracted to lights because of their prevalence. Natural selection (and all its various sub-type – take grade 12 bio if you want details!) is a powerful force.
Perhaps the most surprising stories in the book deal with seemingly innocuous situations: city plants that invade the cracks in sidewalks, the fungi and microbes found in soil (and bathrooms), spiders residing on bridges. The scientists, both professional and citizen-oriented are the ones saving the day with their reason, observation and data-driven respect for knowledge and reason. In these days of anti-science, we must take all opportunities to recognize and reward actual thinking.
As the world becomes more and more urbanized, while the human population continues to grow with little regard for sustainability, it will be our cities that will serve as a potential haven for wildlife in all its forms.
