I've posted a survey of the “Best of London” on the message board that Lauralee Gilmour set-up. I'd encourage everybody who reads this who is (or was) in London to sign up for an account on that message board and fill it out. It would be great to have a collected wisdom about the best restaurants, bars, activities and so on in London.
My fellow blogger and former co-worker, Cenobyte sent me this: Why I Hate Personal Weblogs
Here's an excerpt the author of this article suggested that bloggers should post at least once a month:
Statement of Audience
I realize that nothing I say matters to anyone else on the entire planet.
My opinions are useless and unfocused. I am an expert in nothing. I know
nothing. I am confused about almost everything. I cannot, as an
individual, ever possibly know everything, or even enough to make editorial
commentary on the vast vast majority of things that exist in my world. This
is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that I do not expect
any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read. People who
do read my rambling, incoherent dumbfuckery are probably just as confused as
I am, if not moreso, as they are looking to my sorry ass for an opinion when
they should be outside playing Frisbee with their dog or screwing their life
partner or getting a dog or getting a life partner. Anyone who actually
takes the time to read my bullshit probably deserves to ingest my fucked up
and obviously mistaken opinions on whatever it is that I have written about.
Signed: ————–
She also sent me this:
So I sent her this (which is funnier because it's true):
If you squint really hard, Carolina's uniforms look like Calgary's and hey, any team that has Mike Commodore is fine by me! (Oh man, when I e-mailed her, Carolina scored with two seconds left in the period. Now I go to post this on the blog and Doug Weight just scored for Carolina to put the 'Canes up 4-0 with 17 minutes left in the third. I really hope Edmonton loses in four straight!)
Just a couple shots from our KidLit class trip to Toronto last Friday. I don't know how the picture of JK Rowling's signature at the Osbourne Collection got on my digital camera because you're not allowed to take photos there! 
And a bonus image: the best use for an air conditioner…
So all of the header graphics on every sub-page in this blog have been broken since Day One and I couldn't figure it out (true, I did't spend a lot of time on it, preferring to think “Okay, when I have time at the break, I'll take care of this and a few other lingering problems with the blog.) But anyhow, an idea hit me last night and I check this morning and yep, I'd made the link to the graphic a relative link rather than an absolute one so yeah, of course the graphic is going to be broken every time the blog creates a new directory to archive posts or whatever. What a maroon I am!
Roy Romanow (wouldn't a federal NDP leadership look good on him?) has an article in the latest issue of The Walrus about the history of Canada and where our nation is now:
The Walrus Magazine | A House Half Built
Instead of taking a fifth class, I'm doing an independent study this summer on the relationship between book publishers and public libraries in Canada. Last night I finished the first section, a Literature Search of articles, books, web sites and other materials that dealt with this topic and as I talked about in an earlier post, if it's sometimes hard to let assignments go or to stop adding to and editing them, this one was ten times harder to stop revising and adding to.
When I'm done the whole project, I'll probably post it here for anybody that's interested. A hard copy also goes on the shelf in the Grad Resource Centre for the permanent record. (Looking through the other ones, I was a bit surprised there haven't been more done. This seems like such a great option for people to explore literally any topic they're interested in. I've heard that sometimes people want to do them but the hardest part is finding a supervisor who'll agree to monitor the project.
In that regard, I was very lucky as Lynne McKechnie (who's also teaching me Children's Literature) basically suggested the topic to me when I was in talking to her about some different stuff. I'm pretty glad she agreed to do it – in a faculty full of extremely busy people, I can't believe how much work Lynne does. She's the Acting Associate Dean, she holds the Cleary Research Chair, she teaches our Children's Lit course which (surprisingly?) has one of the heaviest workloads for assignments of any class I have (which means it's also a doubly heavy workload for her reading and marking them.) This week, she's in Toronto for the CAIS conference presenting a paper she did with some of the PhD students so she only gets to run over and join us for part of our field trip. I'm getting tired just thinking about it all!
This Friday, our Children's Literature class is going on a field trip to Toronto.
First, we're going to visit
The
Osborne Collection which is a public collection of rare children's books and which includes two other collections – the Lillian H. Smith Collection and the Canadiana Collection. The site features info about their current exhibit (Books as Toys: The History
and Art of Pop-up and Movable Books) as well as links describing the
three collections in greater detail.
Then in the afternoon, we move on to The
Canadian Children's Book Centre. Their website features resource links, book
reviews, publishers websites and links to author/illustrator
websites. A Classmate of the Day Award to Linda Bussiere for compiling these links and web site summaries to help us get excited for the trip. Our prof joked that she'd booked a yellow school bus to take us for the two-hour trip into Toronto so that we would learn sympathy for some of the things young people endure (at least I hope she was joking!)
If I remember to take the digital camera, I'll post pictures of our adventures.
