Blessed by the Potato

Behold bath toys:

On the right is the ducky I have (and let us not now get into the issue of why a grown man with a PhD has a rubber duckie of his very own). It is an “evil duckie”, yes, but it has been built from the traditional, recognizable form. On the left is a new duckie that Blueberry has.

I do not understand this duckie.

Frankly looking at this thing just freaks me out. It sits there on the bathroom counter at night, watching me brush my teeth.

The wrongness of it gets under my skin and gives me the willies. The strange spiral markings, the hyper-dilated pupils, the weirdly-shaped beak, the centre-line seam, and the tiny head positioned in the middle of its body, with just a bit of off-kilter attitude evokes a sense of being amongst the alien other that the red tint and horns of mine do not come close to doing. There is a part of me that does not want this evil thing to be anywhere near my child, though her abstract amoeba bath toy is totally cool with my subconscious as would be the red duckie with horns (which is supposed to evoke evil).

This is not the only toy of hers that I find to be creepy — just the other day I came home to find a creepy stuffed horse in my bed, and wondered if the baby mafia was out to get me — but this is the one that turns my stomach the most.

Ever since Blueberry started sleeping through the night, I have been the one on baby monitor duty. She’s a pretty good little sleeper — and so am I for that matter, so I can sleep through the little non-emergency noises that would otherwise wake Wayfare. Most of the time I’m only woken up by the false positives of the breathing monitor going off (which, now that’s she’s 1, I can’t wait to turn off).

Well this morning I had to get up earlier than normal, so Wayfare agreed to take the monitor from me whenever she got up to pee in the night. Normally I wouldn’t even hear her come in to get the monitor, but for whatever reason today I did wake up to the creak of a floorboard. And you now have to keep in mind that I’m more than a little bit sleep deprived.

I heard the floor creaking and got really freaked out, I was like “someone’s in my room” and then part of my inner monologue was like “it was probably Wayfare getting the monitor” and then I waited, heart pounding, for about a minute, and slowly,
s
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o
o
o
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reached my hand out to check if the monitor was there AND IT WAS GONE just LIKE I EXPECTED but somehow my brain only latched onto that first bit and for like 20 seconds I was all OMG someone is in the house and stole the monitor and they’re going to steal my baby and do I call 911 first or am I being crazy and I should just rush out and stop them and the police aren’t going to do anything and I don’t want to accidentally wake Blueberry up at this ungodly hour but I have to rescue her yet these guys are obviously pros and probably have guns with silencers I mean come on they snuck into my room to grab the monitor so the sensor pad wouldn’t go off when they snatched up my baby and seconds matter here get out of bed and… oh, right, Wayfare.

So I’m off to bed early tonight.

This has been a really weird spring. A week into April, and we still have hail and snow, including just this past Thursday. On that miserable morning, with the cold April wind blowing and the hail falling down, in the middle of rush hour the TTC decided to put a train out of service. At Davisville — one of only two outdoor stations on that line. In the hail.

WTF were they thinking? Unless the train is actually on fire, there is no reason for pulling it in the middle of rush hour halfway down the leg — take an extra 40 minutes to finish the loop and, if for some reason it must be pulled at Davisville, pull it on the northbound leg. Or given the weather, why could they not have limped one more station to the indoor St. Clair? It makes me wonder whether malevolent spirits haunt and possess the TTC, for that is the only explanation.

Then that same day on the way home, the train lost power at York Mills.

Including leap years, assuming my vacation days escalate with the corporate schedule, that there are 11 stat holidays in a year, that I will have on average 9 flex/lieu/sick days per year, and that I retire at 60, there are only 5699 more days to deal with rush hour on the TTC…

The housing bubble has spurred a huge increase in building over the last decade in Toronto. Massive new condo towers now crowd the lakefront, highway 7, Yonge St., and along the Sheppard subway. The suburbs have grown by leaps and bounds: not so long ago, Canada’s Wonderland was in some kind of magical hinterland north of the city. You had to drive by farms to get to it. Now, the McMansions are packed next to each other, fully covering the rolling hills nearly to King township. And it’s the same in the other directions too.

When I left Toronto, nearly 10 years ago, it was not exactly an empty place: the subway was standing room only for several hours of the day, and rush hour was a nightmare. Now, the subway is standing room only at most times. Most mornings the train is so full people can’t fit and have to wait for the next one as early as Sheppard (just the 3rd stop along the long trek downtown), and people are seriously getting up in my personal space. Traffic is a nightmare at almost all points during the day — even at 4 am, closing a few lanes on the 401 can cause backups — and forget about trying to nip out at 6 pm to grab some grub even up in North York or Markham; it’s gridlock until after 7. Toronto might not be quite as populous or densely populated as New York or Tokyo, but it’s up there, on par with Chicago.

I think New York is a bit of an outlier on our continent, and that it’s not necessarily the goal to shoot for; this isn’t Sim City, we don’t get points for cramming people in just because we can, and we’re not about to turn the CN tower into an arcology.

Toronto’s been growing at about 2% per year, almost double the population growth of Canada as a whole. That sounds like “modest” or “reasonable” growth, but it’s actually quite high for a city that’s as mature as Toronto is. That would mean that in 35 years, 11 million people would call the GTA home. I don’t know about you, but that sounds ludicrous to me. Importantly, consider whether our infrastructure capacity has also grown at 2%/year? I don’t have the data handy, but I recall a decade of service cuts at the TTC, and just a few gains on the GO; I don’t recall any major projects to expand our sewage or water-handling systems. The closest we’ve come is the bare minimum geographical expansion as the borders of the city grew.

And those other large American cities, according to Wikipedia, have not been growing at anywhere near that kind of rate: Chicago topped out somewhere in the 1930’s and has been fairly steady or even shrinking in size since then. New York and LA have been growing at a fraction of the rate the GTA is.

I think it’s time to accept that Toronto is full.

Though that in itself may be a great and lively debate, I think the real question is what to do once that fact is accepted. Toronto hasn’t been growing because of land grants and baby bonuses, and it makes no sense to try to set up a “Toronto quota” to forcibly keep people out. But perhaps it has been just a little too easy to build a massive condo complex in the city — are the development charges anywhere near appropriate for the increased infrastructure costs?

As an aside, I think the city missed a great opportunity with the massive build-out along certain corridors: as long as the ground was being dug up all along Queen/King or the lakeshore for condos, subway lines could have been being built as part of the foundations, stipulated as a necessary part of the design. Then a new subway line (or lines!) would not only track the developments so it would be where the population density was, but would require minimal work from the city itself (connect the fragments together, bridge the area that was already built-up around University).

Back to the question of what to do: I think one goal should be the diversion of growth to the other great cities in Ontario: Hamilton, Guelph-K-W, Kingston, Barrie, Windsor, and of course my adopted hometown, London.

Now, how to redirect the growth there?

I think we can start by throwing incentives right out the window: paying people to move out of Toronto just won’t work, and will be expensive to boot. How do I know it won’t work? There’s already a big economic incentive to not live in Toronto: car insurance is higher, food is more expensive, and the big one: houses are more expensive (you can get more for less than half the price in London) — though a large part of that is a temporary artifact of the housing bubble. All-told, I estimate that it’s about 30% more expensive to live in Toronto, and that’s before lifestyle inflation and the unspoken psychic cost of the godawful commute.

So let’s instead examine why someone possessed with rational thought and a bit of a frugal streak would want to live in Toronto, and try to play off that. Enter Wayfare: she’s got a master’s degree, is not against saving money, and has spent time in London to see that it is an awesome place with ducks and decent transit, so she’s not blindly biased against the mullet perception. Why then did she want to move to Toronto?

• The network effect: her family is in Toronto, and even though London is only a 2-hour drive to go visit, and Hamilton under an hour, she wants to be closer (to be fair, her family has been super-helpful with Blueberry and drop in for a visit twice a week or even more often). A high population begets more population.
• The two-body problem: though there’s a lot of high-tech research, education, and health care in London, it’s tough for a professional spouse to find gainful employment. This is, I suppose, another facet of the network effect of large cities.
• Certain infrastructure is better in Toronto: though London is a regional medical centre, and you can get an MRI or an oncologist really easily there, good luck trying to find a GP to give you a regular check-up. For some reason even though UWO churns out plenty of doctors, all the GPs want to move to Toronto to set up practice. London has a few good restaurants, but Toronto has so many that you can go around stiffing waitstaff on tips for years before you have to revisit a place and risk having your food spat upon.
• The prestige of the big city: I think this is something that mostly affects the female mindset, perhaps because of the giant phallus anchoring the city, but I have been told that there is just something “magical” about Toronto: London has some decent malls, and you can buy anything you want there (or from the internet, like civilized geeks), but “the shopping is better in Toronto”. London has movie theatres and sports teams, and for the number of times most people (including us) actually go to the ROM/AGO/Canada’s Wonderland/Ontario Place/Jay’s game/fringe/a musical, it’s no problem to make the short drive down. Yet somehow it’s not enough to know that it’s possible to get to all that occasional stuff when you want it, it has to be right there, just in case.
• Putting down roots: the flip side of the godawful commuting is that commuting is taken for granted in Toronto. I could quit my job, and likely find a different job that’s also in Toronto, and then commute there… even if it’s on the other side of the city. That would be considered normal. A lot of changes can take place without having to move. Conversely, as nice as London is, if I were to quit a job there odds are my next job might not be in London, or it might involve a move within the city to be closer (because you don’t live in London to commute).

I know that Toronto is full. I believe that the growth rate is going to crash sometime in the next few decades as people find that reality inescapable. Whether because it just gets too expensive and run-down for people to continue to pour in (the New York model), or because the reeking masses of humanity start to turn to crime and rioting (the Detroit model), or because people just can’t keep up an intrinsic reproductive rate when they’re all living in 400 sq ft shoeboxes… but looking at that list, I have no idea what can be done to try to redirect the population growth now, before it gets worse. The network effect is hard to break: the government can move more functions to London, Hamilton, and Kingston, but that won’t necessarily create jobs for lawyers, salesfolk, or librarians. Paying businesses or people to move is expensive (and ineffectual).

There’s the cargo cult approach: build the trappings of a world-class city in the hopes that people will show up. Though I think something practical like a subway might help, the art galleries, theatres, concert halls, and museums of smaller centres have been little more than money pits. After all, someone who’s actually attracted to a city for its “culture” isn’t going to be fooled by Orchestra London, and Hamilton theatre snobs will still just drive to Toronto for their Mirvish or fringe fix.

We could try the stick approach, but the League of Shadows didn’t look so friendly in the Batman movies…

Peanut butter is a truly magical substance. Like many people I have at one time or another tried to make it myself by blenderizing peanuts (and once tried to smoosh honey roasted peanuts in a failed attempt to create the world’s most delicious spread) and it is just not the same. This is reflected in the fact that there is peanut-butter-flavoured ice cream, but not peanut-flavoured ice cream: somehow the process of turning peanuts into peanut butter creates an all-new taste that is just that much better.

Yes, there’s sugar in there, but it’s not just that it’s sweeter. It goes with everything, a kind of universal compatibility that doesn’t just come from a little bit of sweetening. There’s the classic peanut butter and chocolate pairing, but as good as that is it doesn’t really demonstrate peanut butter’s intrinsic cooperative nature, since chocolate-covered peanuts are also good. Consider instead apples, jam, bacon (or so I am told), bananas, crackers, rice krispies, soy beans, and that mass of cellulose fibre that spans the border between food and building material: celery. Nothing made of mere matter could be so universally compatible, so delicious, and yet still contain nutrients.

I asked the question recently of some friends: what doesn’t go with peanut butter? And really all we came up with was laundry (indeed, I got some peanut butter on my shirt while eating apples writing this, and that’s going to need to be pre-treated).

In my head, the Kraft factory consists of large cauldrons of bubbling peanut mush, overseen by teams of witches who imbue it with that magical essence, channelling the vital incantations that transmute a mere collection of ground peanuts into something that is not of this realm. A magical substance composed more of the essence cooperation and taste than it is of sugar, protein, and fat.

I will leave you with one last combination that I thought was common-sense, but my sister (who learned it from me) says blew the mind of some of her friends: peanut butter and pop tarts. Just get yourself a frosted (or plain, though that defeats the point) pop-tart — I’m partial to raspberry but strawberry is every bit as good — toast as usual, and cover with peanut butter before eating. Breakfast is served!