Watawa life

More of the same

November 18th, 2007

The Santa parade was another crowd scene. I don’t know why I bother with this stuff. I don’t like crowded public events at all. I don’t even like kids that much, now that my own has grown up and flown the coop.

And I’m not tall. Tall people have a lot of advantages when it comes to taking pictures. They should be made to stand in holes, or at least kneel down. Then regular-sized people could get some pictures too. (Just kidding. Or am I??????)

Here’s the only halfway good picture I got through the crowd. It isn’t much. Just a couple of dudes in the Shriners band.

I’m pretty impressed with Charles Earl’s picture of the parade. He somehow paid no attention to the crowd and shriners band and little cute kiddies and all that, and took an interesting closeup shot of a bicycle wheel. How did he get so close? Did he go down there two hours early and wait?

Charles Earl also got good pictures at Remembrance Day. I haven’t met him. Maybe he’s incredibly tall. Probably about 10 feet tall, with great concentration and extreme patience.

Dear Charles Earl, I’m just kidding. I really like your pictures, which are at through the broken viewfinder. And if you’re freakishly tall, well, I’m sure that has its own set of problems. ;)

So I went and looked at the new swap box outside of the Invisible Cinema. This one makes a statement about local politics.

I swapped a finger puppet for a button. The button states that I was an exhibitor at Art in the Park 2007. I wasn’t, but now I’ve got the button to prove that I was.

As for Mayor Larry… man, what did we do to deserve this guy? He’s self-obsessed, crass, short-sighted, ignorant, and probably a crook.

Usually I think he’s stupid too, but then it occurs to me that all that ‘Zero means Zero’ crap is actually a clever trick to get dumb people to vote for him. So he could get to be the mayor. And it worked! So if he’s not smart, at least he has animal cunning.

Hey dumb people. Guess what? There’s no free lunch. You have to pay for stuff. (I’m sure no dumb people read this blog. Sorry I mentioned it.)

While I was there I took a couple of pictures of the Invisible Cinema’s interesting signs. Here’s the hippo.

And the big eye.

Why take pictures of signs? Because they are urban history, and they’re impermanent. Before you know it they’re gone.

When the block of apartments at Somerset and Booth burned down, I thought I’d go back in my archives and post a couple of photos of how they used to look. But I didn’t have any. They seemed so ordinary, and so permanent, that I never bothered to take a picture of them.

The big faces on the fence across from Parliament Hill, where we all thought they were going to put the portrait gallery, are gone now. I’m glad I took a few pictures of them. I should have taken hundreds. There are a couple in this post: The City 6.

Then there’s Somerset House, whose days I think are numbered. It has a fantastic mural on the back wall. I took one picture of it, in the post The City 2. I wish I’d zoomed in closer and taken more. Maybe it isn’t too late, but the building sure doesn’t look like that any more.

That’s why I take pictures of signs and stuff.

I liked this goofy little poster. Fart joke and all.

I’m sure you’ve seen this heroic statue on Wellington in front of Parliament Hill.

Up until now I never bothered to find out who that guy is. Turns out he’s Stephen Harper’s great-great grandfather, Henry Albert Harper, M.A., and he drowned in the Ottawa River while trying to save the life of poor Miss Bessie Blair.

This is not true. He’s not related to Stephen Harper. But I don’t have to tell you that. You’re not dumb.

Um… what else? I took a couple of pictures of the sign at the British High Commission, 80 Elgin. I like the reflections and how they look so different when a bus comes along.

80 Elgin 1