This is Ladybug the alpaca, one of the residents at the Blood Moon Alpaca Farm, near Erin, Ontario. The farm held an open day on Sunday and we went along to have a curious snuffle.
The common alpaca and I share a lot of things: we both eat a lot of greens, we both have hair that just goes absolutely everywhere when you try to comb it, and we both react to heat in the same way. We lie on the ground motionless.
Here are some fun facts about alpacas I learnt today.
1. Alpacas are not llamas! (Which kind of messes up the title of this post, really. Oh well.) But they are camelids, like llamas, and er, camels.
2. Alpacas have expressed no opinion on whether they prefer Canada to Peru! (No news is good news!)
3. The gestation period of an alpaca is 345 days, and a baby alpaca is called a cria!
4. More names – a mother is a dam, a father is a sire, and a male alpaca used for breeding is called a macho!
5. Alpacas have soft pads on their feet and leave the roots in the soil when they eat grass: thus, they sustainably manage their own food supply!
6. Alpaca fleece can be made into wool with no extra treatment, and comes in 22 colours. The release of Adobe Photoshop with ALPACA-PANTENE (TM) colours pre-installed is surely imminent.
7. Lots of cute pictures of alpacas on one’s blog can make one’s hits go through the roof!!
8. Alpacas generally live anything from 15 to 25 years old.
Toronto isn’t the first city I’ve lived in on this continent. About nine years ago, I spent a summer in New York City on Bunac, working for minimum wage in a bookstore and surviving on fruit juice.
In my first day in the city, I was jetlagged, and woke up at 4am. I had to attend an ‘orientation’ meeting at 9.30am, where Bunac would tell me, “Welcome to NYC! You won’t be able to afford to feed yourself! LOL! Have a happy summer!” But that was a long time away, and I was too excited to explore to stay in the hostel. So I hopped on the (24-hour) subway to check out where I would be working.
You know the story. It’s one most first-time vistors to New York tell.
I got the express train instead of the local train.
I was led miles astray as I helplessly watched my intended stop zoom past. When I did manage to exit the train, I ended up – I still don’t know where – completely lost in a forest of skyscrapers.
I walked three blocks from the subway stop. It was 6.30am. It was sticky. I felt a drop of rain.
“Oh,” I thought. “It’s just early morning drizzle. I’ll keep walking.”
Then:
THOOM!
KESPLEEEEEEEEESHHH!
I reeled. It was if somebody had poured the whole contents of the Hudson River out of a window above. I was absolutely drenched. And it didn’t stop. Every few seconds, I became doubly and quadruply soaked, until my drenchedness level disappeared off the graph exponentially. I started panicking, running uptown and downtown and crosstown looking for shelter between square blocks like a drunken bee trapped in Tron. And as it was early morning, none of the skyscrapers would open their lobbies.
I got back to the hostel in time for the orientation, and attended looking exhausted and wet, like I had swum from Southampton. But I had learned an important lesson early.
This all a lengthy preamble to that lesson, and it is one I want to repeat here: in this timezone, you must not fuck with the rain.
Here is Toronto 48 hours ago.
Photograph by LeBrown James on Flickr. Licensed by Creative Commons 2.0-by
That’s a shot of Toronto from the east being nailed by lightning. Tons of it. For three hours. It was like having Thor’s paparazzi outside your door. Not just any old lightning, no sirree.
So, I am British, and I am talking about weather. The British are supposed to be famous for talking about the weather. What can I say? It’s a sitcom construct at best. I think we could at best be commended for talking about the weather when there’s so little of it. For a proper conversation, you need proper weather, and for that, you need to come to Canada.
There’s a TV channel called the Weather Network here. You would think a Weather Channel would be an absolute no-brainer in the UK, but they tried it and nobody watched it. Here, it’s been running for 20 years.
Look! Look at all the information they give you on their forecasts. (This one is for Edmonton, AB, but it’s the same wherever you are in the country.)
Ceiling? What’s that? (It’s how high the clouds are). Relative Humidity? Dewpoint? These are all technical terms. And a vital part of the weather forecast is the polar jet stream. Whole summers are decided on what side of the polar jet stream your city falls on.
This paragraph is for my British readers. Do you remember isobars? They looked like thumbprints on the camera lens. They represented contours of pressure. But they were abolished from mainstream forecasts some time ago. That was about the limit of technical weather knowledge we got in the UK. I bet you never even noticed they’d gone, had you?
Let me show you why weather is serious business in Canada.
Where would you get any of that in England? The stakes are just higher. You can’t argue with me here.
The thing is, where I come from, “sun” means it gets a little bit warm in between clouds, “rain” means that it’s cloudy and a bit drizzly, and “snow” consists of six flakes of ice, albeit six flakes that shut down a major capital city for 24 hours, losing £1bn. And did I mention, some clouds?
But I am in North America now. I never knew what weather was until I came here. Sunshine is supposed to last for days, melting roads, causing major fires. Snow lasts all winter, completely changing everyone’s behaviour, inspiring new ways of doing things from sport to urban planning. And as for rain… well, if you’ve been in Toronto in the past two days, you already know what rain is.
The Points of Interest London Underground map, by Dan Zambonini, replaces some of the stop names by what people might find if they disembark. For instance, Earl’s Court is ‘Antipodeans’ and Vauxhall is ‘MI6′.
I don’t want Toronto to be left out of the potential fun to be had, so I’ve had a go at making one for the TTC. Here are the two main lines, but with literal, not geographical stops. Here’s a map for comparison.
Don’t forget, I strongly suggest you change at Shoes to get from Weddings to Hockey.
Yonge-University-Spadina
Downsview
Wilson Concrete MallYorkdale
Lawrence West
Glencairn
Eglinton West
St Clair West Casa LomaDupont ChinatownSpadina ShoesSt George Ugly CrystalMuseum StudentsQueen’s Park HospitalsSt Patrick RockstarsOsgoode CN TowerSt Andrew HockeyUnion TheatresKing Massey HallQueen Department StoresDundas More StudentsCollege RainbowsWellesley Giant Hole In GroundBloor-Yonge Rich FolksRosedale
Summerhill
St Clair YuppiesEglinton – thanks Adil
Lawrence
York Mills
Sheppard-Yonge
North York Centre Bus Traffic JamsFinch
Bloor-Danforth
Hydro TowersKipling
Islington The KingswayRoyal York WeddingsOld Mill PerogiesJane – thanks Laura! Organic ButchersRunnymede TreesHigh Park
Keele The JunctionDundas West
Lansdowne
Dufferin HipstersOssington Bento BoxesChristie Honest Ed’sBathurst ChinatownSpadina ShoesSt George BankersBay Giant Hole In GroundBloor-Yonge St. James TownSherbourne – thanks John
Castle Frank DVP OnrampBroadview – thanks John SouvlakiChester TzatzikiPape Madina MasjidDonlands – thanks John Rotting Movie TheatreGreenwood – ditto
Coxwell BeachWoodbine – thanks Adil
Main Street GolfVictoria Park – thanks @mmmarce Beef PattiesWarden – ditto Mike MyersKennedy
Some important points: I decline to make a subway map poster, for lots of reasons, but the main one is that I can’t be bothered because I’m working on a tiny netbook. If you want to do it, knock yourself out, and I’ll make sure to credit you.
And I’ve also only done the two main lines out of the four. I don’t know if there’s anything of interest on the Scarborough or Sheppard lines. Perhaps you do.
If you have any ideas for anything I’ve missed out, leave a comment below. As you can see, I know the west of the downtown core much more than the north and the east. I don’t think there’s an answer for every station – there certainly isn’t for the London map – but help would be welcomed, and I’ll update the list…
I’m a bit disappointed that the phrase “ugly crystal” linked to the Royal Ontario Museum only appears seventh in Google. Let’s get it up a bit more, shall we? Ugly crystal!
Myers is from Scarborough, ON, and Kennedy is the busiest subway stop there. You’re therefore statisticallly more likely to see Mike Myers at the Kennedy subway stop than any other subway stop in the world. Possibly.
If local print journalism has any kind of future whatsoever, it most likely will be a bit like this magazine, which we picked up during our jaunt across the US border the other week. [Click the thumbnails for bigger, btw.]
I’m serious. If you freely distribute a magazine that is full of local adverts and content that reflects the community, as long as it’s high in quality and well-produced people will take you seriously and keep coming back for more. You won’t become Citizen Kane, but you will be contributing to your society.
For instance, take this important advertorial for the local Catholic scool, erm, hang on.
Well, I’m sure that’s just an oversight. As long as it doesn’t sit in the same few pages as anything un-Catholic, like an advert for a gentlemen’s club, I’m sure the scool, oh sorry, school, won’t mind.
Hokay, well, you know, I’m sure nobody’s made any other mistakes with advert placement…
Oh well. Perhaps we can have a look at some of the other adverts that have been deemed suitable to appear in the paper.
Let’s move swiftly on from the strangely-sourced adverts. In every local community there’s a good writer just waiting to be found. Most of the best journalists around started writing for their locals – in fact, many still do, improving the quality of local journalism even more with their experience.
So please, stand up, the western New York state Julie Burchill.
Never mind. What about Allegany county’s answer to Robert Fisk?
I’m sure you’ll have everybody nodding in agreement there with your well-reasoned, carefully argued point about, about, erm, whatever your point was.
Look, despite all of this, I don’t mean to mock really. I just think it’s important to have the correct skills in your community to produce a paper they can be proud of. It doesn’t matter if it’s free, there’s certainly a demand for advertorial and print adverts, and from that you must be able to get some income to pay editors and writers, even if it is only a little. There must be someone to hold accountable, right?
Le sigh.
Just as well the e-mail address you’ve given to contact your magazine doesn’t mean anything amusing in British slang, does it?
As you may know, I come from a country that essentially consists of a damp island in the north-east Atlantic.
In my former home, it was pretty easy to tell you’d left: if you found yourself drowning in cold, oily water, congratulations, you were no longer in Great Britain.
To actually get in, you had to swim, take a boat or fly. At least this was the case until 15 years ago, when Eurotunnel opened. I don’t believe many Brits have recovered from the shock: you still can’t get a direct train from anywhere other than London to Paris, Lille or Brussels. A land border is just not a British concept.
And so ten days ago was my first ever trip over one – the International Boundary, 5,521 miles long, between Canada and the United States of America. It’s the longest in the world.
This is what happened when I crossed the Peace Bridge by car from Fort Erie, ON, to Buffalo, NY…
Canada -> USA
You pass several massive signs saying “USA ahead” and “Last turn-off before the USA”, then cross the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River. The (bad) picture above shows the point you cross from Canadian to American territory, in the middle of the bridge – it’s where the flags are.
I don’t know who owns the twelve inches between the flags. The UN flag is there. It might be them. I like to think it’s perhaps some primitive Beaver God of Final Arbitration. Or something.
Then, at the other end of the bridge, there’s this:
Not very intimidating for an American border, is it? I was at least expecting fire-breathing eagles, red white and blue spikes and a 100ft mecha Obama.
After a couple of minutes in the traffic we drive up to the booth. The immigration officer is about 6′3″, and has a shiny black gun on his belt. “Are you a landed immigrant?… Any alcohol in the vehicle?… Where are you going?… How long for?… Do you have a visa waiver?… Hmmm.” He zips our passports up into a blue wallet, calls a colleague on his radio and hands the wallet to her. “You’re gonna have to go through immigration.”
I thought that was what I was doing?
He points us to a flat building to the side, with six or seven parking spaces, and gives us a small slip of paper with our car registration on. We drive over, park, and go in through the doors.
Now I’m unfortunately too much of a pussy to take photographs in places like this, so you’ll have to rely on a drawing from memory instead.
Key
A – Bars on the outer doors (and the windows too) B – Wibbly shaped design feature, probably bulletproof glass C – Immigration officer D – Immigration officer they obviously didn’t care about E – Cashier… wait, a cashier? F – I don’t know what goes on in this room but I’m glad I’m not in it G – One of televisions in the room is showing Nascar, a motorsport, apparently similar to Formula 1, but somhow made even more boring. The other is showing Fox News, which is running an imaginary story about a poll it has magicked up showing Obama’s support crashing.
It’s quite cold in here. We wait. There are about 15 other people in four or five families. We are the only white people. We wait. We listen to some 17-year-old starlet sing the Star Spangled Banner before the Nascar race. There are several immigration officers, but they are only calling one passport every five minutes.
We wait. The sun goes down.
One and a half hours later, one of the immigration officers calls me over. She is actually very sweet and polite, and with a nice calming voice, she tells me to fill in a form identical to the one I previously filled in online, takes a photo of my eyes and takes fingerprints from both hands.
It’s probably the cold, or getting confused by waiting, but for some reason I have trouble filling in the form. I nearly tick yes to the question about being a Communist. I’m sure these sorts of environments are designed to befuddle you. Luckily, I get it together for long enough to tick ‘No’ in every box.
“Er. Can we have our passports back now?”
“Sure. Just go over to the cashier’s desk.”
Apparently it costs US$6 to cross the border if you’re not from North America. If you’ve left your credit card in the car, they escort you outside and watch you as you rifle through your glove compartment.
Finally we get our passports, and a stamped ticket we have to show to a bellowing officer by the car park who then lets us drive off.
The offramp from the border control leads directly onto the Buffalo skyway. We didn’t stop in Buffalo. But it sort of reminded me of Birmingham from the M6. More pictures here. Yummy.
USA -> Canada
Americans may be some of the hardest-working people in the world, and only have an average of two weeks’ holiday, but boy are the signwriters indolent sometimes. The picture below is the same junction, on the other side of the interchange. (Two days later, which explains the weather difference.)
See? They can’t even be bothered to write out the full name of the country. I’d understand if it were something long and needlessly stupid like the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but abbreviating that to “Can” is just lazy.
Now er, the Canadian border. Needless to say, it was much easier getting back.
After again only a couple of minutes, we hand our passports and my permanent residence card to the official. He can’t be more than 19. He asks us how much we bought in the US (answer — a $20 t-shirt) and sends us on our way. We then only pay $3.75 for crossing the bridge, and bam! Back to Canada.
And you know, here there are no cold waiting rooms, dingy buildings or people in black with guns. It felt like coming home.
I think, next time I cross the border, I’ll bring a book.
That’s the distance – 514 miles or so – between London and Aberdeen. It’s also the distance we drove on Canada Day[1] weekend from Mississauga, ON, to Tobermory, then to Bracebridge via Collingwood and then back to Mississauga via Toronto.
It’s a massive loop. It took about eleven hours in total to drive over the course of the weekend. You could probably fit six or seven Londons in that space.
We drove all this way to visit some family friends at their cottages. Now, cottages here are basically second homes in the country that some Canadians retreat to at the weekend or for holiday. You know that other massive country that is largely frozen, called Russia? They have those too: dachas for Russian comrades. (Or, Dorset for Russian oligarchs.)
I wouldn’t say everybody here has a cottage, far from it. But they’ve got to do something with all this spare land. This is the land of forest, the muskrat and raccoon, and up towards Bracebridge and in Muskoka county, the moose and bear. The proliferation of cottages barely makes a dent.
Three of the places that we passed through – Tobermory, Wiarton and Bracebridge – are worth a look. They’re all marked on the map.
Tobermory
Fun facts about Tobermory:
1. Tobermory, as well as being a Womble and a town on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, is the town right at the top of the Bruce Peninsula, that dangly bit into the lake four hours north-west of Toronto.
3. On the road about 25km south of Tobermory, there is an old man.
The old man is on a tractor.
The old man has a beard.
The tractor is red.
The tractor will pull out in front of you without looking.
You will swerve into oncoming traffic.
The old man is morbidly obese.
The old man is naked apart from boxer briefs.
You will survive.
You will consign the experience to nightmare fuel.
And you will never be able to look at a red tractor again without shuddering.
Wiarton
By jbcurio on Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 by
I don’t have any of my own pictures of Wiarton, ON, as I was driving at the time. But Wiarton is most famous for Wiarton Willie. Wiarton Willie was a groundhog that predicted how soon winter would end in a big town-wide festival every February. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?
The original Wiarton Willie died in 1999. Unfortunately he did a couple of days before the festival. Faced with crushing losses and disappointment from the cancellation of the celebration, the organisers did the only sensible thing, which was to dress another groundhog’s dead body in black and display it in an open casket, then tell an Associated Press photographer that it was the real one.
The festival’s still on to this day: a couple of new groundhogs have taken over, although they tend to die a lot (they’re buried under the tombstone in the picture). The only thing that remains of the groundhog itself is this sculpture which is not only incredibly phallic but is called, um, Willie.
Bracebridge
It’s a very very long way from Wiarton to Bracebridge, all along the coast of Georgian Bay down lots of long straight roads that look like the above.
I very much liked Bracebridge. It’s not the most important town in Muskoka, but it has tons of bridges, waterfalls, used bookstores, and you can take tours down the Muskoka river.
Bracebridge is also the home of Marty’s World Famous café. I’m always impressed when I come across something in Canada that is actually more expensive than it would be in London. Butter tarts, which are at most one and a half inches in diameter, cost $3.50 (£2.50) – each. And lunch for two people cost $35 (£25). Not including drinks.
To be honest, I probably ought to have heard alarm bells when I saw that instead of prices on the chalk menu that day, there was a note saying “please be kind and generous”. Also, there was a reprint of a Toronto Star article, sadly unavailable online, in which the proprietor was asked to justify his high prices, said he had never read a book all the way through, and admitted to the previous heinous sin of being a property developer. And – and – I have major issues with the facial hair.
Oh well, at least the library was nice.
Anyway. Enough of that. After this weekend, I can now tick one more animal off my list of North American animals I have yet to see in real life…
This muskrat, unfortunately, I have no photo of, as it was dusk and it was swimming next to the shore of a lake. It might not have looked dissimilar to this picture.
But I have one real regret from Canada Day weekend: I’m sad to say I missed ticking off the box marked ‘moose’. There were lots of ‘Danger! Moose’ signs on the road, and abundant forest, but no moose came out to wave a friendly antler hello.
[1] Yeah. Sorry. This blog has come about nine days after Canada Day. I blame having to spend most of my free time shopping last weekend to replace much of the crap I left behind in the UK. And I’d also like to find a way to blame the mosquitoes. [back]
[3] I always thought a great name for a tech blog or podcast from Oregon would be ‘Beavers Cherries Input‘, from Johnny 5 in Short Circuit. I’d use it, except, er, I didn’t move to Oregon. Darn. [back]
What is the difference between these two bottles of HP sauce?
Is it…
a. the one on the left is British, and the one on the right is Canadian?
or is it…
b. the one on the left is lush and should be compulsory on all barbecue products, and the one on the right mings heavily and should be only put on things so the dog will not chew them?
The answer is both a and b, but also c:
c. the one on the left is room temperature, and the one on the right lives in the fridge.
It’s very, very hot today – the first time in the city this year. So this is an extremely important and timely question:
Why do Canadians, when they spend so much time behind a barbecue during the summer, smother their meat or veggie burgers with condiments that are ice cold? Doesn’t it, well, make the food no longer piping hot?
There might be a thing going on there with hot food and cold food together tasting good, like cold ice cream on hot apple crumble. Which is understandable. But burger is not dessert, and I find that to taste something, it needs to be at least close to body temperature.
But most Canadians would disagree. This country has some strange ideas as to what temperature things need to be consumed at.
To illustrate, I have illustrated the temperature of a selection of common items I eat for breakfast, after painstaking research and months of careful observation. [1]
I have already explained brown sauce, so let us take the rest in turn:
Beer in Canada is only served just as its about to freeze. Coors Light even comes in cans that turn blue if it’s very cold. This is because if Canadian lager is cold enough to numb your tastebuds, you suppress the gag reflex, and you can drink it. Myself, I actually take beer out of the fridge and leave it in the sun for an hour so it is warm enough to taste: Black Sheep Ale, for instance, has a recommended drinking temperature of 11C.
Eggs, for some reason, have to go in the fridge here. In fact, in supermarkets, they can only be found in the fridge, a fact that utterly confused me for a full 20 minutes on my first shopping trip. Unless all the chickens [2] in Canada live in giant refridgerators, this makes no logical sense. Another reason this doesn’t make sense: you generally have to apply heat to eggs to eat them.
Toast must never be served or eaten at anything less than steaming hot. Not even Canadian birds will eat toast that has gone a little bit cold. And raccoons will only use warm toast to wipe their arses with.
Coffee is similar. Drive-through coffee is normally served at the temperature of lava, and the lids are usually spring-loaded. We laughed a lot in the UK about the story of the woman who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot, but liquids in confined spaces at 3,500C are no source of amusement.
In the UK, if the coffee in the machine has been standing around for a while developing a sweaty bouquet, it’s delicious.
The final, and most important thing I have marked on this map is the Zone of Pain, which exists between 10C and 80C. In Canada, any consumables that enter this zone are immediately unpalatable and must be thrown away.
This sometimes causes problems in our kitchen, particularly when I am making tea. After I pour the tea, brew it for the requisite ten minutes and add milk, the temperature sometimes dips into the Zone of Pain. The Canadians with me politely drink this tea, and then water the pot-plants with it when my back is turned.
You will notice that all of the British breakfast products exist within the Zone of Pain.
I’m off to suck on a couple of ice cubes, and burn my tongue off with a chai tea latte.
[1] This blog, like all blogs and everybody’s opinion on the internet, has been subject to peer-review, and you should take it as seriously as you would any academic journal. [back] [2] I am fully aware that this is the third time on this blog I have talked about chickens, and I promise to stop eventually. [back]
But there are some things that you just can’t do, or at least couldn’t until a few years ago.
Take, for instance, drying clothes outside. For decades here, it was forbidden. A ban on drying your clothes outside is absolute madness in these days of global warming. I mean, there’s all this extra heat – you may as well use it.
Luckily, Phyllis Morris, the mayor of Aurora, a small town about 48km (29 miles) north of Toronto, saw the absurdity of all of this. She suggested that the existing legislation could be bypassed if Ontario reclassified clothes lines as ‘green technology’. A bit of a stretch, really, unless somebody has developed a clothes drying app for the iPhone.
But the suggestion flew. In April 2008, the premier of Ontario finally signed into law this amendment (pdf).
It should have worked, but it doesn’t seem to have increased the number of clotheslines in this city.
Using your old washer/dryer as draining for growing a lovely pot of [Insert flower name here please, subs] is a good idea for some people. But there are quite a lot of others not too happy about this across North America. Guess why? Property prices.
Listening to Richard Monson, the president of the California Association of Homeowners Associations, you would think that homeowners ought to be as worried about clotheslines as about vermin or graffiti…
A clothesline in a neighborhood can lower property values by “15 percent,” Monson is fond of saying. “Modern homeowners don’t like people’s underwear in public. It’s just unsightly.”
“The people who moved here wanted convenience and a suburban paradise – sheets and clothes hanging out symbolized a less affluent time,” Mayor Morris said.
Some homeowners and developers still support the bans. “I can see why people would want to do it for the environment, but the houses here are so close together, you don’t really want to look at your neighbor’s laundry,” said Danielle DeCastro, 28.
The second strange law in Toronto, which so far is still officially in place, concerns these creatures here seen in their natural habitat.
New York and Chicago already have it — now Toronto is considering joining those cities and allowing residents to raise chickens in their backyards.
Toronto’s park and environment committee is considering a pilot project that would permit people to keep the poultry on their property.
Ian Aley, with the non-profit group FoodShare, says it has plans to rent half an acre at Downsview Park in north Toronto where it will grow vegetables, keep bees and raise chickens.
Now, you can already keep chickens in London, and as the article points out, New York City and Paris. Vancouver, too. And eggs, fresh from the cloaca, are delicious.
But if you have to go all the way to Downsview instead of your back garden to get them why not just go to the supermarket? This isn’t much of a pilot.
Still, baby steps, I suppose, but standing in the way are people like these commenters on the CBC article:
This will make those comming from the third world feel right at home
Toronto turning into a 3rd world country??? With the way Canada is going and multiculturalism I can see this in the years to come… So SAD this Country. What is Next Goats and Cows roaming Yonge St??? Someone at city hall wake up
Great Idea!! Very progressive thinking.Toronto is now almost completely populated by people from countries where livestock is kept right in the living quarters of the homeowner… Newly arrived immigrants can raise livestock thus eliminating the alienation that many feel once they come here and native Toronto residents can go back to the roots and raise chickens just like their forefathers did
That last quote had 61 recommendations.
Now there I think is the source of the problem with both the laundry and the poultry. Despite the law change, I haven’t seen people putting their clothes out to dry in the summer in Toronto [1], and if the city does decide to let chickens into backyards, I don’t think we’ll see any either.
As far as I understand, many housing blocks such as condos and townhouses are owned by cooperatives and have local rules that prevent such things as laundry outside and chickens. I suspect peer pressure may be to blame as well. The truth is, life is comfortable here. Life was less comfortable for people’s ancestors, who kept chickens and hung their clothes out to dry.
And people understandably don’t want to do anything that makes them feel less comfortable, even if it is environmentally or financially sound.
I’m no libertarian, but I do dream of a day where any Torontonian can marry a chicken under a clothes line in their backyard, then drive to the airport for their honeymoon in Nunavut while booking a seal offal platter at a restaurant by cellphone. Come on, you can already 70% do this in London. Sort it out, Toronto.
It would be wrong to say Mississauga is entirely devoid of life. Let me introduce you a creature unheard of in the UK, but very much present in Canada…
By Lexnger on Flickr, licenced under Creative Commons 2.0 by-nc
This is a raccoon, known formally as Procyon lotor.
(Procyon lotor sounds like one of Doctor Who’s adversaries, actually. The Procyon lotor stands on top of the Tardis, noisily tips it over with its weight so it bursts open, and then eats all the Doctor’s teabags and fruit rinds, causing him minor inconvenience when he wakes up the next morning. Steven Moffat? If you’re listening, this would make a great episode.)
When it isn’t travelling through space, a raccoon is a forest creature and an omnivore. Normally thought to be solitary, it does its best to avoid human contact. But as the humans cut down the forests and build cities on top, they take full advantage and thrive.
Yesterday, we had raccoons visit. This is what a raccoon managed to do to a neighbour’s food waste bin, after she left the door of her garage open:
What a mess.
There are two things to be said about this picture.
1. Somebody, not just the raccoon, really really likes watermelon.
2. According to Wikipedia, raccoons are normally thought to be colour-blind, except for the colour green. So why have the municipalities of both Toronto and Peel [1] decided to make the food waste bins green?
Of course, the raccoon itself has long fled the scene of the om nom nom. We knew it was a raccoon because when initially found the bin tipped over, we saw a masked face peeking out from behind another car, pretending to look innocent. We left, and it started ripping the bags up.
What’s the solution? Perhaps you should keep your car in one garage and your food waste bin in your other garage.
Or, the most popular solution: tune a radio to a talk station and put that next to your bin. Raccoons really don’t like the sound of human voices that much and tend to scarper whenever they hear people.
I speak for myself, but raccoons aren’t really disliked that much here. They occupy the same sort of position within human society as urban foxes (which also live in Mississauga) – a bit of an inconvenience sometimes, but not as long as you’re careful with your bins. And isn’t it nice to have a little bit of nature on your doorstep occasionally?
The real hated and feared wild animal around here is, of course, Mephitis mephitis, or the striped skunk.
I haven’t encountered a real-life skunk yet, but I’m sure amusement will ensue when I do.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that on my first ever trip to Canada five years ago, I snapped this extraordinary raccoon behaviour about three miles from Niagara Falls:
So here we have a raccoon, in broad daylight, eating something not thrown away, that seems to believe it’s in a petting zoo.
Perhaps this one worked out that if it looks cute and puts its paw on tourists’ knees, it will get even better, fresher food than its rummaging colleagues. It’s all about the evolutionary value of cuteness.
In short – raccoons are clever, and could probably beat you at Jenga, if you were playing on top of a bin.
[Any more? I saw something last week about a town taken over by herd of bison, but I can't find it at the moment...]
[1] Peel region is where Mississauga is situated. Peel is a super name for a place to hang out if you’re a raccoon. It would be like me living in a town called Cake. [back]
Downsview
Hydro Towers 
