Totem Pole City

We have now paid one and half visits to the stunning Museum of Canadian History. Fine site on the north bank of the Ottawa River, handy for all the dinky little restaurants and bars popping up in the Hull/Gatineau area. Stunning building both inside and out. Extensive gardens. Nice spacious entry area, nice spacious entry level restaurant plus a rather smaller higher level restaurant. Not altogether clear who would use this last, given the number of proper restaurants in the vicinity.

Perhaps pride of place goes to the totem pole hall illustrated, occupying a good slice of one side of the building, overlooking the river.

Then there is a gallery given to some other first nations, but we were a little tired by then to get the best out of it. We had overindulged on the totem poles and related exhibits, which last included some interesting textiles.

The third big gallery is presently under reconstruction. Then there were two or three special exhibitions which we did not do. And an IMAX film about the Galapagos which we did not do, maybe this last being a mistake.

On the way back from the first visit we took a little ferry boat across to the entry to the Rideau Canal, driven by a cheerful French Canadian. It rained so it was an opportunity to deploy my blue plastic spray protector from the 'Maid in the Mist' at Niagara Falls. We have never been and I forget from where it came, but it served on this day to keep the rain out, my having failed to find a proper plastic mac, of the sort once favoured by MIL & FIL, before we left the UK.

One and a half visits because we paid one proper visit and a second improper visit, when we thought perhaps to go around again but decided not and headed off back across the Alexandra Bridge to the Blue Cactus sports bar for lunch, where we were served by a very bouncy blonde waitress, who it seemed lived in 30 acres out in the sticks somewhere with her husband. Or maybe hectares, but not enough to live on I daresay.

Reference 1: http://www.historymuseum.ca/home.

Reference 2: http://www.bluecactusbarandgrill.com/site/HTML/home.html.

Construction

Time for a review of construction in general and concrete more particularly.

Their spades and shovels have no handles, following the Continental and Irish fashions.

Their wheelbarrows are built on wooden A-frames, with the wheel at the apex of the A, rather than on tubular steel, as is the case with us.

They do not seem to have caught onto the UK fashion for luffing boom tower cranes, and while you do see them here, it is mostly the horizontal jib sort.

Their concrete pumps and mixer lorries are similar to ours, but tend to come larger, and some of them run to six axles, which I have not seen in the UK. The one illustrated was in Hull, too far away to get a decent shot. But there was a four axle mixer truck waiting in the street where I was. I continue to wonder what happens at the end when you have completed the pour but the pumping tube is still full of concrete. How do you get it all out and where does it go?

The local paper in Watertown had an article on pouring the concrete for the floor of a box store in the winter when it was something ridiculous like 30 below (I think they mainly talk Farenheit in US weather). They needed space heaters, presumably very big ones, for this to work. The floor is still up there as they only had the grand opening quite recently; possibly Stratton Hardware, but their web site (reference 3) says nothing about how or when the store was built and I cannot now track the article down.

But sidewalks is what I know most about, having spent quality time on sidewalks over the last few weeks.

Most of the sidewalks are made of concrete slabs, maybe six feet square, cast in situ on top of a steel mesh laid directly on top of something like our type 1 sub-base, roughly what you would get if you washed all the cement out of wet concrete; not much sand and very little silt. Somehow they get a striated, rough finish, presumably anti-slip, but I never saw them doing this, so I don't know how they do it. Just about visible if you click on the illustration at reference 2.

Then there are the kerb options. Sometimes the kerb is cast, all of a piece, with the slab. This might or might not include a rounded steel corner to protect the upper road side edge. Sometimes the kerb is separate, usually concrete and about eight feet long, far too big to lay by hand as used to be the custom with us, presumably pre-cast. And sometimes they use sawn pink granite, presumably for the tonier, down-town areas.

Must make a proper study of how they handle the corners before we fly out. At the time our house was built in Epsom, they still went in for both properly shaped corner pieces and curved kerb stones, while now they just seem to butt the regular straights up any old how. A loss of craftsmanship & polish to the business.

Reference 1: for some good pictures of big concrete equipment see http://www.putzmeister.com/enu/index.htm, an outfit of whom I had not heard before today.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/fossil-leaves.html.

Reference 3: http://www.strattonhardware.com/.

Station spotting

I follow yesterday's post about trains with one about stations, having been very impressed by the shiny new main station a few miles south east of central Ottawa.

I did not think to take any proper pictures, only pictures of the rather splendid model locomotives on display, with that included left being lifted from google, but it was impressive. Handsome matt black steel roof trusses. A proper concourse area with plenty of space and enough seats. Few shops. Clean and decent rest rooms. All in all, very good and I can only say in our defense that Ottawa station must handle a very small number of passengers indeed compared with Waterloo. There did not, for example, seem to be very much at all - if anything - in the way of commuter lines. But they did take imitating airlines further than we do and have gone in for baggage allowances & overhead lockers as well as hosts & hostesses with trolleys.

And then a few days ago we discovered that the main station used to be slap bang in the middle of town, with railway lines all over the place, including over the Alexandra Bridge mentioned a few days ago.

At some point the city fathers decided to free up this valuable site in central Ottawa, relocated the station to the south east, added a bus station called 'TRAIN' and scrubbed out the lines over the river to Hull. And the only catch with all this is that the old central station building is still there, once very grand with lots of pillars, now, by the look of it, largely disused. Sufficiently grand that 'Union Station' was spelled out in stone above the pillars with an initial 'V', in the best classical manner. Probably their version of a Grade I listed building. And we had mistaken it for a former bank or town hall.

While Alexandra bridge has been recycled, now carrying both a road and a pedestrian walkway, the combination of which need more space than a railway line, thus explaining why extensions have been stuck on both sides, rather in the way of those stuck on Hungerford Bridge in London.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/vertigo.html.

Solaris IV

A conceptual artist, or perhaps a neurological scientist, has come up with a new toy where by means of a hat with electrodes you can connect your head to a bowl of a special green liquid containing a special brown blob. The brown blob then takes on life from your subsconscious; pulsing, throbbing and moving around the bowl. The edges of the blob might become frilly in a more or less elaborate way, reminding one of those pictures of fractals.

Some part of your subconscious has been projected into the brown blob.

If you are the right sort of person and you give the thing enough time, you come to be able to control the brown blob, at least up to a point. Apparently it feels very odd to watch some part of yourself swimming around in the green. Can the brown blob take on a life of its own, more or less independent of yourself? Do you get upset if someone switches your blob off?

Maybe, if you are a person with split personality, you can organise things so that one of your personalities swims around in the bowl while another, the conscious one, watches from the side lines.

Given the symmetry of the diagram, who is to say that the brain is in charge, rather than the bowl?

Not sure about the ethics of this sort of thing, this meddling with the unknown. It makes me a little uncomfortable, in the way of but more strongly than those tricks which some conceptual artists play with our vision. Is it wise to be meddling with a brain in such an intimate way? But then again, is it any worse than bathing the brain in strange & unnatural substances - for example nicotine? Or is the brain such a robust & resilient beast that it can just soak it all up?

Reference 1: http://ceeds-project.eu/2014/09/23/solaris-a-magnetic-pool-of-liquid-controlled-by-human-brainwaves/.

Reference 2: I associate to dancing water bowls. See http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=dancing+water.

Train spotting

Yesterday to Smith's Falls to see the falls, to find that they were missing, swallowed up in the water works needed to build the Rideau Canal. And we just missed the Hershey chocolate factory, once the employer of 500 souls and the destination for countless coachloads of chocoholics. Its loss was a big deal for a town of this size.

But there were train spotting compensations. We went over a number of level crossings, something which one is hard to put to find in the UK these days, beyond the one between Raynes Park and Motspur Park,

We found the derelict bridge illustrated. The first time that I have seen such a thing outside of a boy's book of engineering wonders of the world.

We found an outdoor railway museum, containing heritage locos and rolling stock. Sadly, no time to visit.

We passed a huge train, which must have been a mile or more long and which involved at least two rather shabby looking Canadian Pacific locomotives, not, I think, at the front of the train, rather somewhere in the middle. A good part of the train was tank cars, presumably for moving oil from Alberta, presumably empty as the train was moving slowly west. It may have been a train like this which crashed into a town in Quebec, with considerable loss of life, a few years ago. I think someone forgot to put the brake on and the thing ran away. Been in the papers quite recently, perhaps in connection with a government report on rail safety.

Lunch of a Canadian-Italian variety at Norm's Restaurant. Very good it was too; just what one would hope to find in a small town in the wilds of Ontario. The place with the purple blind, across the road from RBC, at gmaps 44.9004322,-76.0212791. To follow the lasagne, there were no puddings, but there was a selection of pies. I didn't fancy rhubard & raspberry (combined operations, not two different pies) and took an excellent lemon meringue. Just like mother used to make, all those years ago.

And I see from gmaps that Smith's Falls includes considerable railroad infrastructure, so accounting for the presence of the museum. They clearly needed something to shift all that chocolate.

Reference 1: http://www.hersheys.com/chocolateworld/.

Reference 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridges_of_Madison_County.

Reference 3: http://www.smithsfalls.ca/railwaymuseumofeasternonta.cfm. Museum site proper was unresponsive this morning.

Japanese fabric

One of the Japanese fabrics mentioned in the last post. A cunning confection of cutting and creasing, inspired in part by origami.

Interesting, and one could think of various good things to do with it, but presumably prohibitively expensive, certainly for the likes of us. Maybe we should tell the Conran shop in Marylebone High Road about the stuff; just their sort of thing.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/01/the-hunt-for-red-january.html.

Reference 2: for Reiko Sudo + Nuno see http://www.nuno.com/en/. It being a small world, they also get a mention from our very own University College of the Creative Arts (at Epsom amongst other places). See http://transitionandinfluence.com/2121Vision/.

Ancient and modern

Last weekend to Almonte to visit the museum there, once the warehouse and administration block for a woollen mill, the mill proper now being apartments, although it was not clear whether these were apartments for seniors or commuters or both. A mill once driven by the waters of the nearby Mississippi.

The museum was in two parts with the ground floor being an interesting exhibition of contemporary fabrics from Japan and with the first floor being an exhibition of the sort of machinery which was around when the mill was up and running. Including a stuffed and rather oddly shaped sheep: it seems that the land roundabout was not much good for arable farming and so was used for sheep, although not to the extent that the mill did not rely on wool imported from Australia.

The large machine in the illustration is a contraption for sewing together narrow strips of carpet to make something more like our modern broadloom. We thought about how one might bring such a thing back into production, at least to the extent of giving demonstrations from time to time. Requirement one would be for a person who liked tinkering with machines - perhaps a retired farmer or a retired motorbike enthusiast - and who had the skills & tools needed to make the various parts which would no doubt be missing. Enthusiastic enough to work out how the thing worked in the absence of both manual and working machine. Requirement two would be for a sufficient supply of narrow strips of carpet to make a convincing demonstration. Alternatively, the wife of said enthusiast could be recruited to unpick the product of each demonstration in time for the next. We will continue to review our acquaintance for candidates. But it would be fun to see such a thing working.

It occurred to us when we got home that modern sheets, particularly the large ones favoured by hotels, could not possibly have been woven on the sort of looms available in cottages, the sort of thing that might have been used by the likes of Silas Marner. BH thought that two or more strips of sheeting might have been sewn together lengthwise, by hand, to make a completed sheet. Developing the thought, making large sheets of a fine material like silk by hand must have been prodigiously expensive. Developing further, one might meditate on the transformation of messy wads of cotton fibres into something close to a plane surface, a mathematical entity; a transformation from disorder to order. See http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/fluff.html.

Another machine included a pre-cursor of the punched card. The punched card was a steel plate, about one inch by two, with four hole positions. The punch cards were arranged on a short chain, rather like the caterpillar track of a tank and on each throw of the shuttle the chain was advanced by one link. Then, by means of a mechanical train which I was not able to sort out in the time available, the deal was that when the hole was present, the corresponding shaft (along with its heddles. See google to find out what these things are. Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heddle.) was raised. And so the pattern encoded into the punched card was woven into the fabric.

There were also a large spinning wheel and a couple of hand looms, with these last being in a fit state for demonstrations and we wondered whether four was some kind of a magic number for the number of shafts. Setting up shafts was clearly an expensive business and so one would not gratuitously add to their number. But what sort of patterns could one weave with five shafts that one could not weave with four? I associate to the cellular automata described by Stephen Wolfram in his book about a new kind of science. Could his Mathematica program do the business for me?

One rather sad exhibit appeared to have been abandoned with the operator not bothering to clean it down of whatever it was doing when it was turned off. It looked as if he or she had just powered the thing down, maybe cut off the completed cloth and walked away, leaving the machine, the uncompleted cloth, the bobbins and so on and so forth to rust down, neglected in some shed. A sad end to a fine bit of engineering.

Almonte was interesting in part because, like both Watertown and Tupperlake, it was a town which had lost its founding industry, although in this case that was textiles rather than lumber. In size more like Tupperlake than Watertown and successful in that the interesting main street included a respectable selection of antique & household object shops. Maybe now a commuter town rather than a working town.

Reference 1: http://mvtm.ca/mvtm/.

Reference 2: https://www.wolframscience.com/.

Two firsts

First, our first meal in the English style for several weeks now. That is to say, meat and veg.. More precisely, sausage, brussels sprouts, swede and pasta. All cooked in water, although in the case of the garlic sausage this was more a warming up, it having been previously hot smoked. Nice not to have a hot meal not involving hot cheese.

Second, our first visit to the theatre. More precisely, to the National Arts Centre ensemble production of 'The Importance of Being Earnest'. The free programme explained, inter alia, that this Earnest is a chestnut which has a hot pepper hidden inside. Ensemble in the sense that the Centre put together an ensemble for a season of plays, a system which we have, sadly, more or less abandoned in our London theatres. Tickets at $75 each, not much less than one might pay in London.

We were told that the centre was around thirty years old, and like our National Theatre, included a number of stages, with the one we were in not being the largest. Despite that it was a handsome modern theatre, the shape and perhaps the size of our Olivier Theatre, but without the revolutions. But as it turned out, for me anyway, both theatre and the stage (with its rather odd & very conspicuous proscenium arch added to frame the rest of the set) were too large. The play was too slight a thing to survive in the space it was given. Furthermore, the actors seemed to spend a lot of the time facing us and speaking rather loudly, presumably in order to be heard at the back, but I like my actors to preserve at least some sense of speaking to each other, even though they are, indeed, speaking to us.

The play was given in English English, rather than the Toronto English which was the native tongue of most of the cast. I think the result of this was that far too much energy was spent on getting the accents right, and not enough on getting the play right. Although I did notice that by the end, the native accents of Jack were breaking through. Algernon was very tall - maybe seven feet tall - and played very foppish. But he had a lightness of person which carried it off. I also rather like Cecily although I was not so impressed afterwards to read that she is involved in a web series about flushing in bathrooms. Lady Bracknell, a lady originally from Kingston, Jamaica, rather than Kingston, Surrey (the home of our Rose Theatre, spartan by comparison with this one, but at least with a proper bar operation (see below)), had a great costume and great presence. But she did not quite pull it off and her odd delivery irritated rather than amused.

Rather long at two and three quarter hours, including two breaks, Very feeble attempt at smoking at one point by the two male leads and one did not get the impression that they were very keen. Or maybe the smoking exemption for theatres here is not as full-blooded as our own. And the theatre was not very keen either on selling us refreshments, with provision in that department being very feeble. Are they so well endowed that they do not need the revenue? Well endowed or not, we did have to share the main concourse area with something called Convocation 2014 for Algonquin College, the graduation event for an outfit which looked to be somewhere between our own Nescot and Kingston University. And very flash it was too.

Out by an entrance which no-one else seemed to be using to find a lone taxi handily waiting for us. Off to Lower Town, to learn that with the traffic lights nicely synchronised on the grid road layout, one could, at night, do the whole of Dalhousie in one go. Maybe most of the people there - it felt much like a National Theare audience, although a touch quiet & respectable - came by car and had used the (900 spaces) centre car park.

Home to read what the 'Citizen' made of it in their 'You' section, with their piece headed 'Farcical physicality mars Wilde's classic' - which did not mean anything sexual, rather just the horseplay - and 'No need to act out metaphors'. They liked the costumes, as I did, and they liked the set, which I was not so keen on. They did not like Lady Bracknell, having similar problems with her delivery to mine. Their second heading was right in that the piece was laboured rather than slick.

Reference 1: a not very enthusiastic notice at http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2013/03/its-that-earnest-time-again.html, But another production where height was important and smoking, while present, was not.

Reference 2: a not very enthusiastic notice at the second and third posts at http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/2011_09_01_archive.html. Much more smoking in this one.

Reference 3: flushing can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRSrGBfXHFs.

Intensification

The digger in the road the other day has turned out to have legitimate business here.

There was a property a few doors down fronted by a small white board house. It seems that the deal was that the developer could do what he liked in the back provided he kept the board house in front.

So what was on the back of the board house was ripped down and the digger has now dug out the back yard, this digging resulting in a procession of trucks down the street. A Canadian version of the trucks operated by Penwarden back in Epsom.

No doubt when we are next in town the hole will have turned into a small block of flats and no doubt other properties will have gone the same way, which will be a pity as we rather like the street as it is, a bit shabby and all. But we are puzzled as to how a developer a bit further along got permission to build a six storey block, not so many years ago, two storeys taller than anything nearby and four storeys taller than most of the existing housing. I thought that they were quite fierce about both that and trees around here. Maybe he knew somebody.

A Canadian version of what we call back land development back in Epsom. The cause, in our case, of much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/diggers.html.

Reference 2: http://www.penwardenhaulage.co.uk/.

Reference 3: for trees, see https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/tree_bylaw_en.pdf. Cross the functionary called the General Manager at your peril.

Fruit & veg 2

As always, a lot of pumpkins, garlic and maple syrup at the market yesterday. There were also a lot of apples, many of them being sold by the chaps who grew them.

Lots of different sorts, a lot of them a dark red, almost livery, a colour I am rather dubious about in apples, certainly English ones.

But then, in the margins of a syrup stall, we came across a small pile of shiny, orangey-red apples. Great big things, almost spherical in shape, maybe three inches in diameter, all for $2 a pop. There was still a bit of green about the edges which I thought a good thing. The chap on the stall said that it was some very new variety, I forget the name, and I bought one. A very good thing it turned out to be too; the best apple we have had for a while. Very fresh, not more than a day or so old, crisp texture and sweet enough, with a touch of sharpness. One apple was enough for the two of us and I forgot to take its picture until we were half way through it.

PS: the chopping board we are using just presently, visible underneath the apple, is very heavy. So it just as well we did not buy the much larger version mentioned at http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/09/hook-road.html. They might look OK on television chef programmes, where they seem to pop up all the time, but a pain in a real kitchen.

Fruit & veg 1

First in show at Byward Market yesterday.

Vertigo

Yesterday morning we walked over two bridges over the Ottawa River.

First, the Cartier-MacDonald, a continuous span girder bridge crossing the river at a point where it is about half a kilometre across, seen in the distance in the illustration left. There is a significant hump in the middle, not clear from the illustration, certainly when viewed from the south on foot and certainly a bit of a pull to the top on a bicycle.

Second, the Alexandra, a truss bridge crossing the river at a point where it is about a third of a kilometre across, seen in the foreground. Quite flat and perhaps a little lower than the first.

Now I have had vertigo for most of my life and it is getting slowly worse. But it is capricious in the sense that sometimes it kicks in and sometimes it doesn't and in this case it was much stronger on the first bridge, from south to north, than on the second, from north to south, back to Lower Town.

The walkway on the first bridge was on the far side, a narrow path, on concrete I think. On the left, a two feet concrete barrier between us and the traffic (going the same way as ourselves) and on the right, an open barrier of steel, about four feet high. One one very conscious of the traffic whizzing past, it was all very open & exposed and when I was not admiring the fine views I was all too conscious of how high up we were.

The walkway on the second bridge was on the near side, a wide, close boarded path (rather like that on some seaside piers at home in the UK), maybe twelve feet wide. On the left, the trusses of the bridge proper and on the right, an open barrier of steel, much like that on the first bridge. Much more comfortable.

Thinking it about it this morning I think there were three relevant differences. First, the first bridge was longer, higher and humped. The river did seem very wide and one did seem very high up, with the impression of height strengthened in that one climbed up one side and went down the other. Perhaps a question of scale in that I do not get vertigo on its smaller cousin in London, Waterloo Bridge. Second, with the high trusses to the left, the second walkway was much more enclosed. I do not, for example, get vertigo in aeroplanes, Third, the wide second walkway was much more like a regular path and one could walk much further away from the barrier. Far less conscious of the height over the water, far more comfortable. But not to the point where I was very happy about leaning over the barrier.

I should say that I once chickened out of walking Brooklyn Bridge in New York, telling myself that I did not really have the time to negotiate the approach roads. But I did just about manage Clifton Bridge in Bristol. And as far as I can remember I was OK on the bridge over the Loire at St. Nazaire, which seems odd looking back. Big and very open in streetview.

Beavers

A genuine, inhabited beaver lodge, somewhere near Ottawa.

Some bright spark claimed that I had turned my head at the one time that a beaver poked his head above the water. Hand up for chickadees.

It seems that a lot of beavers went to make top hats, some of them for people from first nations. It is not at all clear to me how you get from brown beaver fur to black top hat, but I do recall reading that beaver fur is the most waterproof fur known to man and is very good for making hats.

Reference 1: for chickadees see http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/so-off-we-went-to-upper-canada-village.html.

Diggers

The scene outside our holiday house when we got back the other day.

Unsuitable trucks in streets being something of an issue in today's city elections.

Montreal churches

We visited four churches in Montreal: all Catholic, all rather different and all rather good in their different ways. There must have been plenty of money about for such purposes - and it is also noticeable how many schools and hospitals, have a church flavour, Catholic or otherwise.

Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal

19th century gothic, a lot of paint (similar colour scheme to King's College Chapel in London), rather more successful inside than the Ottawa version, although, with its two galleries running along the aisles and around the back, still rather like a large and ornate theatre of about the same period, which association detracted from its holiness. Nevertheless, very impressive lighting effects around the highly decorated sanctuary. The illustration gives some idea.

But, a first for us, a Catholic church which charges for entry. It was also busy on the Wednesday morning we visited, perhaps with people from the two cruise ships we saw parked in the old harbour.

An interesting chapel at the back, with a great deal of pale brown wood, restoration gothic below, modern above and including a modern altar piece. The two tones appeared to be intended to symbolise the rebuilding after a disastrous fire. The images offered by google at 'chapelle de la basilique notre-dame de montréal' give some idea.

Pope visited.

Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours

The sailors' church, rebuilt after a fire in the late 18th century, rather handsome and rather similar to one of our own baroque churches in London from a hundred years previous. The mise-en-scène included a number of model boats suspended from the ceiling.

We were lucky enough to catch the end of an organ recital which gave the place a holier feel than it might otherwise have had.

St. Patrick's Basilica

19th century gothic. Less ornate than Notre-Dame and with few visitors. Appeared to be of steel construction, with the steel covered in painted papier-mâché or some such, done rather well. A lot of timber had been spent on the pews. Overall, I liked it better than Notre-Dame; perhaps because it was a bit quieter and more Protestant in tone.

There was also an interesting display of relics in a side room. Including a fragment of bone from St. Patrick himself and a replica of a nail from the True Cross, with the replica having been sanctified by its having touched aforesaid True Nail.

Bibles in English rather than the usual French.

Secondary double glazing outside the stained glass.

Basilique-cathédrale Marie-Reine-du-Monde

A copy in small of St. Peter's in Rome, so not at all restoration gothic. With it's coffered, barrel arched ceilings it reminded me of St. Paul's in London and I rather liked it.

While we were there there was something called a rosary service, which seemed to consist of a series of short elements, with each element being the priest saying something followed by the congregational response, in unison. Like the organ in the chapel, and despite the picture takers carrying on regardless, this gave the visit some extra holiness. Still more in a side chapel reserved for private prayer & meditation, a reservation which was respected.

PS 1: à propos of French, we were assured by a receptionist somewhere that, despite the fierce language laws in Quebec, it was still OK to lecture in English at McGill, provided lecture notes in French were made available - which seemed fair enough.

PS 2: the Canadians seem to have or less given up on people taking pictures in churches and museums, although one church did draw the line at a camera on a pole,

Reference 1: for King's College Chapel see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=lentil+news.

The Piano Tuner

This being the title of a book by Daniel Mason, a chap who started out as a Harvard biologist but who then went in for doctoring. In between, in 2002, he spent time on malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border, during which he wrote this best seller. No idea what he is doing now, but he did publish a second novel some years later. I came across the first amongst the many books which come with our holiday house.

A book which can be said to have three threads. First, a piano tuner from London. Second, a charismatic and piano loving army doctor in the Shan Hills who goes native, rather in the way of the trader in 'Heart of Darkness' or the colonel in 'Apocalypse Now', with the piano tuner taking the role of the seeker who goes up country. Third, the setting in the Shan States of 1875 or so, at that time in a unsettled state following the incomplete incorporation of Burma into the British Empire.

We are taught quite a lot about the mysteries of piano tuning and about Érard grand pianos, with Érard being an important milestone in the evolution of the modern grand piano. It seems also that a piano tuner in the 19th century did more than just tune a piano, he also serviced it, rather in the way that one might now service a car or a washing machine, in particular by giving the hammers and action a wash and brush up. Not something a blind person could take on - thinking here of the once common association. Perhaps no longer, with the numbers of pianos to be tuned not being what it was.

We are taught quite a lot about the Shan States of the middle of the second half of the 19th century, from whose situation I associated to the clans of the Scottish highlands of the century before. There are political parallels. Mason also makes the point that the British were very concerned at the time about the French pushing into Indo-China from the east - a change from their better documented concerns about the Russians pushing towards the Indian sub-continent from the north. A facet of the great game which I had not known about.

Apart from the story seeming a bit far fetched, I did notice a few mistakes and I did worry that the book contained a lot of material which would have taken a lot of gathering and checking, a lot for someone who had a day job with malaria. How careful had he been? How reliable were his facts? And there is the usual difficulty with historical fiction of this sort in knowing which bits are fact and which bits are fiction. I dare say the general sense of the condition of the Shan States at the time is not that far off, but it would be interesting to take another look at the story from another hand - to which end the references at the end of the book are not very helpful, being to books which I imagine I would have some difficulty getting at. On the other hand, Amazon offers various possibilities.

Cabbages

A couple of cabbage like plants which have sprung up at the very front of a garden in our pleasant scruffy street in Lower Town.

Turnips

Up bright and early this morning and off to the Byward market to top up on brussels sprouts. Then, spotting a pile of swedes, here called turnips, could not resist buying one of those. The chap selling it, brown enough to be a land worker rather than a shop worker and rather older than most of the other vendors, admitted to getting up at six o'clock, not as early as I had expected.

Back past the iPho restaurant which seems to specialise in something called bubble tea at $5.95 a go or so. Then past the Cornerstone, not a rather off-beat church, as in Epsom, rather one of the many bar restaurants in this area. And so to the Murray Street baker to take an artisanale baguette and a half rye, this last to go under the cinnamon honey we had bought the day before and which was said to go well on buttered brown toast.

Home to find the litter pickers up and running, equipped, inter alia, with what looked like a laptop bag. Maybe it was actually a post bag and the litter pickers double up as deliverers of election fliers.

Reference 1: http://ipho-ottawa.com/.

Reference 2: http://www.cornerstonebarandgrill.ca/, not to be confused with http://epsomcf.org.uk/, or any of the other cornerstone church outfits which seem to be scattered generously across the globe.

Reference 3: http://www.heavenlyhoney.ca/. The honey turned out to be a mixture of No. 1 white honey, butter and cinnamon. A smooth but slightly granular mix, in texture somewhat like the orgo peanut butter we use at home (rather than the inappropriately smooth stuff we got by mistake from Loblaws. See http://www.loblaws.ca/en_CA.html). For some reason, I associate to the huge tubs of something called Nutella which seem to decorate the tops of things like refrigerators in the cafés here. See http://www.nutella.ca/.

The Green Door

Following our visit to a vegetarian restaurant in Gatineau, we were tipped off about another, the Green Door, in Main Street. Main Street being a rather oddly named street running roughly north and south between the Rideau Canal and the Rideau River, but cut off by the Canal from downtown Ottawa proper, so it does not look as if it were ever the main street of the last named. Maybe it was the main street of a place called Sandy Hill before it was incorporated into Ottawa. And what about the place on Main Street called the Old Town Hall, about the history of which I can find little beyond it being a heritage building?

However, I digress. We actually started off by getting a No. 9 bus from where we are staying in Lower Town to the Hurdman bus station, from where we struck west, taking our bearings with the newly acquired Suunto compass, over the grassy hillock mentioned yesterday, through the scrubby woodland to the Ridean River Eastern Pathway, an important recreational resource for the city. On the way we heard a lot more birds than we have in weeks, some of them flocking in the tops of trees. We think that at least three sorts of bird were involved. One starlings, apparently introduced to North America amid some controversy from Europe. Two, some sort of small magpie shaped bird, possibly a bluejay. Three was a single hearing of a distinctive squawk, not a starling. Four was a single close up sighting of small magpie shaped bird doing a woodpecker on a tree trunk, possibly a downy woodpecker. Five was a couple of girls from Toronto doing the pathway on a hired, three seater tandem bicycle.

Headed south down the pathway, through the pleasant autumn woods with sightings of the Rideau River until we reached the Main Street bridge, which we crossed and then headed north up Main Street, passing a substantial electrical substation before we made it to the St. Paul University, possibly one of the many operations of the Catholic Church hereabouts. Here we found a craft fair and a farmers' market (this being a Sunday lunchtime) and the Green Door operation opposite.

Did a bit of craft, but passed on the farmers' market, it being more convenient to get vegetables from the Byward Market much nearer home, and so onto the Green Door.

A busy place, with a fairly but not exclusively young clientele. The food was presented in a buffet, with maybe fifty or more dishes to chose from and the deal was that you put what you wanted on a plate which was then weighed at checkout. You paid by weight, an arrangement which seemed admirably simple and fair, but perhaps only works when you are not offering expensive meaty or fishy items. We got a very decent lunch at around $20 for the two of us, topped up by an excellent spiced apple cake to take away.

From where we took the bus home. Luckily the rain which had come on when we were vegging it had more or less stopped by the time we got to Mackenzie King, where we got off to make our way through the Rideau Centre, a large shopping centre under reconstruction, on our way to the Byward Market. I was reminded of the Las Vegas casinos where the interiors are cunningly designed to make it very hard to find the way out.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/two-lunches.html.

Reference 2: http://www.thegreendoor.ca/.

Lewis

Television has been something of a problem since arriving in North America, partly because of the quality of the television, linked to Bell in some way or another, we have been using for most of the time, but more because of the quality of programming. The density of ITV3 style programmes - for example Lewis or Poirot - seems to be low and the density of advertisements seems to be high. Minor irritations are the facts that the channels offered by the Bell flavoured television do not seem to correspond in any obvious way to the TV guides offered by the newspapers and that many of them are only offered on a pay-to-view basis.

BH has been working hard to master the vagaries of the system and has now reached the point where she can reliably access weather forecasts. But yesterday evening she surpassed herself and found a recent episode of 'Lewis', screened in its 90 minute (or so) entirety without advertisements. So recent that the Foxy sergeant had been promoted to inspector, a promotion which was entirely new to us. Will this promotion destabilise the series, as police whodunnit series of this sort, by long standing convention, involve a hero and a sidekick, not two heroes?

Closer inspection this morning reveals that the programme was brought to us by the Masterpiece Trust which seems to be part of the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) family. Both operations being some kind of not-for-profit, charitable operations of long standing. They both invite donations, rather in the way of the wikipedia foundation.

Sadly I was completely defeated by wikipedia's exposition of PBS. Maybe I will try again tomorrow. And maybe Cameron & Co. should try a diet of North American television before they dismantle the BBC. All very well for the rich & the Bullingdon Boys who can afford other forms of entertainment, but what about the rest of us?

I note in passing that a large proportion of the programmes offered by the Masterpiece people appear to be from the UK. And a large proportion those have a heritage, costume drama flavour. Oxford colleges, stately homes, whatever. That is clearly what we are good at these days.

Reference 1: http://www.pbs.org/.

Reference 2: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece.

Fluff

Somewhere to the west of the Hurdman bus station, on a low, rather unkempt hillock overlooking the Rideau River, or at least it would have done had there not been some trees in the way, we came across a large number of white fluffy balls, one of which is illustrated left.

They appeared to have escaped from pods on otherwise uninteresting plants which were scattered about the hillock. Were they mutant dandelions? Mutant cotton plants? In any event, we did think that maybe one could do something spinning with the stuff, although we shall not risk trying to bring a sample home, as customs and/or agricultural people can get a bit stuffy about taking recently live parts of plants across state lines.

PS: the Rideau River is a substantial river, as big at Hurdman as the Thames is at, say, Kew. It is a tributary of the Ottawa River, and this last is a tributary of the St. Lawrence River. They do rivers big around here, with the last named warranting the French moniker of a fleuve rather than a mere rivière.

Reference 1: gmaps 45.410236, -75.667352.

McGill

The day of the Complexe Desjardins was also the day of McGill, a day for a bit of family history as my mother graduated from this university in 1936, at which time we now know that the fairly small number of ladies at McGill were corralled into the Royal Victoria College. Their equivalent of Girton or Somerville.

A rather grand place, with a large central campus spreading out into the neighbouring streets. Founded in 1821, an almost exact contemporary of our own University College, founded in 1826, and some 200 years younger than Harvard College, to the buildings of which these had some resemblance - although to be fair, my knowledge of US university buildings is mainly derived from horror films.

Lots of students milling about, seemingly on return from a half term holiday for Thanksgiving, a custom which I do not remember from my student days, but which BH assures me did indeed exist.

The idea then was to go to the library and see if they would let us look at the student year books, a North American custom which I am fairly sure we did not have. Start with a helpful porter in the grand central building, a North American version of the sort of porter you might get in 'Lewis', who directed us to the Redpath Library.

The lady at the desk at the entrance to the Redpath Library directed us to the rare books department on the fourth floor.

The lady at the desk at the entrance to the rare books department took our passports into her custody, instructed us to leave all our coats and baggage in the cloakroom and took us off to her collection of year books. Where BH turned up the picture of my mother included above. Rendall, Cynthia, picture top middle.

The lady at the desk also explained that the year books had been scanned and that we could look at them there at our leisure, although that did not have had quite the frisson of seeing the real thing at the real place. But we did come across the plausible mention of her love of classical music and an intriguing mention of her regret at doing arts rather than medicine, this last being entirely new to me. A regret which was hidden deep under her enthusiasm for, and for teaching, English Literature.

 I should also say that the rare books department appeared to be well endowed and to have a lot of very rare stuff, in addition to year books. So, altogether a fine place, with very helpful staff. One wonders how one would have got on if one tried the same thing at a UK university.

Complexe Desjardins

It was rather wet, windy and cold when we walked back from Sherbrooke the other day, so we took a break in the Complexe Desjardins.

Rather a striking place when one first walks into it, with a huge atrium right in the middle, flanked by several floors of shops, restaurants and all the rest of it. Part of the underground city which Montrealers use to hang out in in the winter. The centre's web site is presently under reconstruction, but google offers plenty of pictures which give some idea of the place, although not of its size and light, of which the illustration left is one.

Going down the steps from street level to the floor of the atrium, I managed to miss my footing, and very nearly landed on my nose, but actually crashed into a handy bit of hoarding, a bit of hoarding with enough give to absorb the crash. Passers by were both concerned and amused at my misadventure. I observe in passing that Montreal seemed to me to be a town with a great many steps, not least the rather high and sometimes irregular kerbs, and it was not the first time that I had stumbled, although this was far and away the most spectacular.

I also observe in passing that I rather liked the office blocks in the area. Big and flashy yes, but a bit more sober and restrained that some of the vulgarly flashy buildings you find in our City of London. But maybe these were a little older than those and closer inspection would reveal that Montreal does vulgar too.

Shaken but not stirred, we took hot drinks in one of the many cafés and had a modest look around the place before resuming our trek back to Days Inn.

McCord

Yesterday to the McCord museum on Sherbrooke where we had first people clothing, Montreal miscellanea and Ben's deli.

A quality display of first people clothing, inter alia, nicely illustrating the way that the customs prevailing before our arrival changed after our arrival, both with our industrial goods, such as beads, and with our appetite for collecting first nation artefacts. Also reminding us that it was not just a tale of disease, depopulation and marginalisation. For some time, the first peoples were interacting and trading with the newcomers, on something more like equal terms, this being nicely illustrated by a blow up of painting of important members of the first nations wearing top hats along with more traditional items. We may have seen the original at Chateau Ramezay.

Like the Tudor aristocracy in England, the first nation aristocracy in Canada wore their wealth. Unlike the Masai in Kenya who herded theirs.

Montreal is gradually sinking in, so the display of miscellanea from Montreal was entertaining, particularly as regards the drive among the monied classes in the second half of the nineteenth century to emulate, if not ape, the customs of their betters in old world. I wonder this morning how much snobbery there was about old money and new money, considering that there must have been a good deal of the latter. There was also an early example of a maid powered washing machine, illustrated,

Our visit closed with the galley devoted to Ben's deli, which we learned was famous, in some part because of his smoked meat sandwiches, in the middle of the 20th century, before drifting to a rather sad ending in 2006, with the catering workers of today not being prepared to work the sort of hours in the sort of conditions which had brought the place to fame in the first place. After a heritage wrangle, a larger version of the sort of thing we have in Epsom, the place was demolished in 2008.

The museum café was said to be doing Ben's smoked meat according to the original recipe, but it looked both crowded and expensive so we settled for the new to us Pannizza along the road where they assemble and cook your pizza or panini while you wait, in 2 minutes 15 seconds to be precise, the pizza base being part cooked to get the time down this far. Not bad at all, although the pizza top had a tendency to detach from the pizza bottom, certainly much better than the slices of ready made pizza one can buy from hot cupboards in Leicester Square.

We did slightly better in the evening, taking poutine with smoked meat topping from the Lester's attached to our hotel (the Days Inn on René Lévesque), with Lester's being alleged to be one of the chains who had taken up Ben's mantle. The smoked meat turned out to be chopped and rather salty bacon and the poutine had rather too much rather strongly flavoured gravy in it. Not bad, but not a patch on the poutine which we had had on 15th October.

Reference 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bens_De_Luxe_Delicatessen_%26_Restaurant.

Reference 2: http://www.pannizza.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/poutine.html.

PS: according to wikipedia there is something in the Quebec language laws which prohibits the use of apostrophes in words like 'Bens'. Certainly the famous sign outside their shop does not appear to have one.

Calibrating the new compass

Woke up this morning to think about calibrating the new compass, having vaguely remembered that the magnetic pole is somewhere in Canada and that maybe declination was a bigger deal here than it was near London.

So off to the ever helpful Google which took me to http://magnetic-declination.com/ which told me that the declination at Montreal was 14 degrees west while that at London was near enough zero, rather less than it had been when I was a boy scout. But one had to be careful not to click on the large blue buttons which were designed to display full screen advertisements rather than to help.

And so to wikipedia just to confirm my understanding of this matter, where I was pleased to find their article illustrated with a compass very like the one I had just bought, only different in that they had used the A-1000 model rather than the A-10 model. They also had a very natty animated diagram which showed how declination had changed across the world over time - the amount of change over time being far larger than I had expected and the manner of change over space being surprising.

I was reminded of the very similar diagrams of amphidromic points, but with these being to do with tides rather than compasses. See http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/search?q=amphidromic. Alternatively, I can ask google about 'amphidromic points. Defined in the 1987 Manual of Navigation' to get to the same place. I suspect google of knowing who is using this PC and tweaking the result accordingly - but it is clever all the same.

I have also learned that I can reference individual posts in volume 1 of this blog, which I had not realised was possible, thinking that its basic unit was the month rather than the post. So http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/2011/10/water.html does the job too. I suppose it ought to have been obvious that there was just one database underpinning the whole business, without regard to which template one happened to be using - but it wasn't.

The quest for a new compass

As I mentioned on 19th October, I had mislaid my compass, a Silva compass I must have had for near fifty years. All very sad, so I went as far as to go back to Enterprise to see if anyone had handed it in, which they hadn't, so I now needed a new one.

Other peoples' telephones seem to include a compass, but I have not found a compass button on mine, and, in any event, I would rather have an old-speak magnetic compass which was not part of my telephone and so dependent, inter alia, on the vagaries of its battery.

So not finding an outdoor store in central Ottawa, I tried a department store. The first young lady I spoke had no idea what a compass was but smilingly suggested that perhaps I should try the men's department. The second young lady, in the men's department, did know what a compass was but could certainly not sell me one. No-one had ever asked her such a thing before, in all her years in the men's department.

Next stop a store selling odds and ends near the Byward Market. The chap there knew what a compass was, did not have one, but was able to suggest a store on the Richmond Road, some miles away. Consulted google to find that there was indeed an outdoor store on the Richmond Road and so started to make plans to be there, hoping that the suggestions on their web site that the only compasses that they sold were electrical gadgets costing $100 or more were untrue. Plans which were suspended for a few days while we were in Montreal.

And then yesterday evening, quite by chance and quite late at night, we come across an outdoor store in Rue St-Denis called Atmosphère, a store which looked like a grander version of our own Millets, or perhaps Cotswold, the people from whom I have bought my last few pairs of trainers. Outdoor clothes, boots, bags and such like. Not only did they know what a compass was, they had a selection of the very thing that I wanted and we rapidly came to an agreement on the A-10 model from Suunto, very like the lost Silva. Mine for $17.24 including tax, about the same, I think, as Amazon would have been for something similar.

As part of the patter, I learned that the French for this sort of compass was boussole while the French for the other sort of compass, the sort for drawing circles, was compass. All very odd. Also very odd that I cannot recall coming across the word before, despite the occasional involvement of boats in the sort of French novels that I read. And they even had the grace to smile when I explained that we would now be able to find our way back to the hotel.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/trolley-11.html.

Reference 2: http://en.atmosphere.ca/ seems to deny the existence of the store at 1610 Rue St-Denis. But plenty in western Canada and one in the far east, aka Nova Scotia.

Morality tale

It seems quite likely that it will not be many years before we have machines which are, for most purposes, more intelligent than people.

It seems at least possible that some such machines will be both conscious and self-conscious, in the same sort of way that we are.

So is it proper to be making and breaking such machines? A thought which has cropped up in plenty of science fiction movies. I am thinking here of their human rights, rather than the possibility that they might take over our world, perhaps getting rid of us in the process.

We breed lots of cattle in order to kill them for meat. But we kill them humanely, at least most of the time, and cattle, while conscious are probably only barely self-conscious. Most of us do not have a problem with the meat. Most of us do not think that there is an issue with animals which are not mammals, or perhaps not vertebrates, never mind vegetables.

We breed lots of people. But we look after most of them with great care. We accord them human rights, certainly after they are more than a few hours or days old. Some people accord them human rights from the moment of conception, but that is going too far to my mind.

But it does also seem to me that if one succeeded in making a machine which was exactly the same as us, in the sense that it had consciousness, self-consciousness, feelings, sensations, general purpose intelligence and general knowledge, that such a machine should be accorded human rights. Bearing in mind that such a machine might grow, at least in the brain department, rather in the way that a human does. It does not come out of the box with consciousness, but it does, with enough up-time, acquire it. So one should not make and break them lightly. This would not have been the position in the ancient world where people who came from a different culture or a different country than oneself barely qualified as people at all. They could be treated more or less as cattle - or slaves.

It is also reasonably clear to me that the sort of computer which beat the world at chess or the sort of computer which beat the world at Jeopardy! do not qualify. The latter might have general purpose intelligence and general knowledge, which the former does not, but it does not have consciousness, self-consciousness, feelings or sensations.

However, lots of people are working on machines which do, or at least on the science & technology which such a machine would need, and I think it reasonably likely that they will succeed, at least in part, in say the next twenty years or so. Should we let them? I am reminded of the debate about nuclear physics back in the middle of the last century: was this something a decent scientist should work on, given its potential for evil? A debate which curiosity won, even if it has not yet killed the cat.

It is possible that it will turn out that the 'at least in part' qualification above is all wrong in that once one has succeeded in creating any sensation of the sort that humans have - for example, fear, pain, touch or taste - it will be but a short step to creating all the others. That the difficult bit is getting started.

I shall, along with those lots of people, continue to ponder in odd moments.

PS 1: some non-vertebrates, say octopuses, have quite sophisticated nervous systems. Will it turn out that they are getting on for as conscious as cows?

PS 2: 'curiosity killed the cat' is an odd phrase, in the sense that it is not at all clear why it means what it does, but a phrase which wikipedia tells me has been about since at least the sixteenth century. But it does not tell me nearly enough about how the phrase came into being.

Reference 1: for the last mention of Jeopardy! see http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/07/watson.html.

Two lunches

Two very different lunches, in different places, but which had important similarities.

Came across both places quite by chance, being in the right place at the right time. Both places were quite small, maybe 50 covers each, catering mainly to what looked like local people taking their lunch, mainly in pairs. Both places were mainly staffed by small, chipper young waitresses who spoke French but who could manage English for the likes of us. How much black coffee did they need to be like that? Both places turned out to be very good and after the event both places appeared to be well regarded by the likes of Trip Advisor. Neither place appeared to have a web site.

Both places managed water, more or less at room temperature, without bubbles and without lumps, that is to say ice. I continue to maintain that attacking a warm stomach with ice-cold fizzy water is both unnatural and unhealthy. Or beer for that matter.

La Belle Verte Vegan Restaurant, 166 Rue Eddy, Gatineau

We were trying to get to a festival of Ottawan food at the casino at Lac Leamy and having successfully got a bus across the river, we trying to walk the second leg, but got tired at Rue Eddy, which at least had the virtue of being like the Gatineau I remembered from my last trip to Ottawa, rather than being overrun by office blocks and developers. Thought about an apparently empty place, apparently run by someone Middle Eastern at the corner of Allumettières and Eddy but persisted down hill and found ourselves outside this one.

We had veggies burgers with a green salad. The veggie burgers were made partly of some kind of lentils, but had structure, not being the same all the way through. The green salads were excellent, including several small & curly items we had not come across before.

Abandoned the food festival at this point and having got as far as some huge government building at the bottom of the hill, took a taxi home. Does the government put such buildings in Gatineau for much the same reason as ours might put them in Gateshead? Employment for the disaffected?

Muru Crêpe, 362 Rue Notre-Dame Est, Montréal

We were having a swing around Old Town, Montreal and having been tempted by the place illustrated, came across this second place. Maybe we will make it to the first place tomorrow. It certainly looked very grand, very old Montreal although I was a little doubtful about the menu, very meatish, with just one offering from each of a variety of animals, rather like a fine dining pub (soi disant) back home.

First course, stuffed pancake with green salad and fries, nicely served on a large square plate. The white shiny stuff that has taken the foodie world by storm.

Second course, naked pancake, just folded with some (icing) sugar and with some thin slices of lemon on top. Very like the sort of pancake BH might have done us at home, the only difference being that this one was probably cooked in vegetable oil rather than pork oil. I had to be firm to stop them covering the thing in butter and cream.

Continued to the engaging Château Ramezay.

Reference 1: http://www.casinosduquebec.com/lacleamy/en/.

Reference 2: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/fossil-leaves.html.

Reference 3: http://www.pierreducalvet.ca/english/.

Reference 4: http://www.chateauramezay.qc.ca/en/.

The one that will probably get away

We found a good selection of Inuit (and some other First Nation) art in a gallery in Old Town, Montreal today and were very taken with this fish, not very well illustrated. From Cape Dorset, and not quite a fish, rather a shaman transforming to or from a fishy state.

Priced at $9,000 and we did not ask what some of the larger and more complicated pieces went for. But I am grateful to NJ for letting me take a picture of this one.

Very much a growth industry, with the Inuit not having made pieces of this size and sophistication for all that long. But they have been very busy since the early 1950's.

Reference 1: http://www.imagesboreales.com/. They have better images there, but I was not able to find the fish, at least not in the time I gave it.

Corruption

Today's waking thought took as its text an anecdote about a supplier to the public service being invited to pop some money into someone's private account to ensure that he got the contract.

I was very firm at the time that very little of that sort of thing went on in the UK and this morning I got to wondering about that firmness. What protection do we have in the UK against the public procurement process being corrupted in this way?

For one, it is illegal. I think that it is illegal to offer this sort of bribe and it is illegal to accept one. So anyone making such an offer would need to be careful about to whom he made it. There would need to be some warming up, maybe a few drinks to soften up the ambience. It would be easy to get it wrong and find oneself struck out of this particular public procurement, if not worse.

For two, government, in general terms anyway, only buys from respectable companies with proper accounts. So a bribing company would need to be able to hide any bribe in its accounts. Maybe companies have off-account cash funds which they can draw on for such purposes. Funds which could, for example, be built up by inflating the salary of the cash fund holder. But such expedients are probably illegal too and in any event would get more difficult as the amount of the bribe got larger.

For three, government procurement is supposed to be open. This means that anyone can play and a seriously corrupt supplier is apt to be undercut on price by an honest supplier. It also means that the procurement process is set out in public and includes both a requirement and an evaluation model, which complicates the task of the recipient of the bribe, even if he or she is leading the procurement,

One way around this one, and the example which comes to mind, as it happens, was a procurement of snow clearing machinery in Ottawa, is to include in the requirement a feature which you know that only the desired company can meet, at least in the short term. Naturally such a feature would have to be introduced into the procurement at an early stage and would have to be sensible. Any old joke feature would not do. Maybe the would be briber could help the wannabee bribee out here?

Another way around this one is to supply shoddy goods and trust the bribee to turn a blind eye until it was all too late. The catch here is that this would probably require the bribee to involve others, reducing his take and increasing the risk of detection.

By which time I am fully awake and decide that this can all be left to the wizards of public procurement (often well-paid contractors themselves, as it happens), happy in the thought that while they might have their problems, they are probably not to do with corruption. There are plenty of other things to go wrong.

Boasting

The other day I was boasting about how handy it was that I had learned to put maps onto to my telephone. See reference 1.

Then yesterday, I found a good tourist map of central Montreal on their tourist web site and thought to load that.

Which was all well and good, but for some reason I am finding it very difficult to use, unlike other maps which I have loaded.

Problem 1 is that it always opens in small, that is to say with the entire map on the small screen and one needs to zoom in each time to be able to read it. Which would not be too bad in itself, if it were not that the zoom process is quite slow, proceeding by small squares across the map. Where on earth is all the power of the telephone? Is there no Intel inside?

Problem 2 is that one moves about on the zoomed up map by stroking it. Which is all well and good, I can indeed do stroking, as might have been deduced from the name of the first volume of this blog, http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.ca/. But all too often I stroke it in the wrong way and the telephone thinks I want to go back to the beginning, losing both my zoom and my position. Where do I go to get help with my stroking?

Problem 3 is ancilliary. When I came to do a snip to illustrate this post, the MS Snipping Tool, for the first time as it happens, failed. Get the thing to be snipped on the screen, call up the snipping tool and, lo and behold, the thing to be snipped is minimised and one is snipping whatever was underneath, which is no use at all. Have the Adobe people built something into their pdf reader to stop one doing just this? Have they done some deal with the pdf using industry and put some twiddle into pdfs which allows the suppliers of pdfs to block snipping? Am I letting my paranoia about the goings on in the industry get in the way of sorting out some straightforward finger trouble?

In any event, I have had to settle for screen scrape in MS Paint.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/muddle.html.

Place Sun-Yat-Sen

Finding ourselves in need of feeding in Montreal's Chinatown this evening, quite possibly around the Rue de la Gauchetière Ouest (gmaps 45.5075824,-73.5604752), we opted for a two part meal.

Part 1 consisted of lemon tea (with lemon, not something coming ready mixed in some sort of tea bag) and buns from a café which seemed to specialise in cakes and buns, some rather elaborate, but did do other stuff, like noodles as well. One of several such in the street. With the tea we took two soft bread buns flavoured with something said to be beefy for him and one round orange-yellow bun with some sort of fruity filling for her.

Thus fortified we moved onto Part 2 at another restaurant a few doors down the street, where we passed up the jelly fish option, but did take won-ton soup, pleasantly mild, followed by fried rice with beef, prawn (not too clever, maybe from a freezer bag) and noodles. Also pleasantly mild and coming in large portions. They could even manage tap water with neither bubbles nor ice, which I had specified in French, the deal having been that you wrote down the numbers of the things you wanted with the paper and pencil provided, but with water not being on the list and having to be written out longhand. Quiet, nice decor and ambience. Not too smart and not too scruffy. We were the only white folks among the clientèle.

Menu marked with warning peppers against the hot stuff, which was handy, as neither of us are too hot on hot.

Out to discover a memorial to Sun-Yat-Sen, a large bust, placed without much ceremony next to what looked like a large souvenir shop, but with some large kites stretched out in front.

PS: according to Lonely Planet: 'dedicated to Sun Yat Sen, the ideological father of modern China, this small square was opened in 1988. The space was later refashioned by eight craftsmen from Shanghai who used traditional methods and materials. The mural on the north and east walls is made of grey slate. There’s a small concrete stage for performances and a pavilion from which souvenirs or knickknacks are sold. On any given day here you will find old-timers sitting on stone stools laughing and gossiping in Cantonese while a handful of Falun Gong demonstrators hand out their literature nearby'.

Chain saw art

What was left of the work of the chain saw artist on Monday morning.

Will the Bytown dustbin men pretend that they think that it is a piece of conceptual art and carefully leave it where it lies?

Two arts and a building

A few days ago we visited the Ottawa Art Gallery and were rather surprised to find an art collective, including modest gallery space, housed in the old courthouse. We had been confused by their web site, mistaking ambitions for actuality.

However, we were very taken with the work of Alma Duncan, possibly a contemporary of my mother's at McGill. An artist most active in the middle of the twentieth century, a period which I generally get on with quite well. An artist whose work included a  number of short animated films made in the late forties and early fifties which were great fun, if a little politically incorrect by today's standards. Not only could we see the films, we could also see the puppets, props and other gear which had been used to make them - and surprisingly small they were too.

From there onto Byward Market for a light lunch where we were further entertained by a an ancient car, a pair of flamboyant stilt walkers, a group of alpine horn players and a chain saw artist.

From there to the parks around the National Gallery, taking in the fine view from the statue of Colonel By and the even finer one from the statue of Champlain.

And so to our second visit to the shiny new National Gallery of Canada, on this occasion to look at their European collections, collections which rather gave the impression that Canada had been a little late on parade when it came to collecting old masters. But it did have a stunning new gallery to put them in. And there was some good stuff, for example a trio of nice Guardis. An entertaining painting of the Virgin Mary being told of her impending death by an angel, otherwise the Annunciation of the Virgin's Death by one Orlando. For all the world a picture of a comfortable matron being bothered by some busy & large social worker. A fine picture of a deserted factory by one Algernon Newton, an English artist of whom I had not previously heard and whom I must look into.

We were also pleased to be able to buy a book about the building for a very reasonable $10, a book which turned out to contain some interesting material on the history and purpose of national galleries generally.

It also told us about the mirror works. While we were in the European collections, on the second level, we had been intrigued by a number of portholes into what looked like mirror lined, brightly lit rooms. There were no labels, but we had assumed that they were some sort of modern work of art, complementing the ancient works of art. But we were wrong, as the book tells us that the mirror lined rooms were actually cunning contrivances to supply overhead natural light to the galleries on the first level. Pillars of light as it were.

And then yesterday, we happened across the large government looking buildings on Green Island at the mouth of the Rideau River. To the point of sneaking in, courtesy of a passing inhabitant, and taking a look around inside. Another stunning building, which seemed to have pinched lots of ideas from the National Gallery building. And I learn from wikipedia this morning, that the same architect was indeed involved, but on this occasion amid a great deal of controversy, with many people thinking that his work on Green Island was grossly extravagant. It did, in any event, stand vacant for a while, while they thought of what to do with it.

It seems that the white steel artwork towering above, now called the Unity Tower or some such, is just the skeleton of what was originally intended to be two towers.

There was also a small plaque outside memorialising Her Majesty's gift of swans from Abingdon-on-Thames - with two swans, presumably descendants of the originals, bedding down behind.

Reference 1: http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/.

Reference 2: http://www.gallery.ca/en/.

The good shepherd

We across this building strolling around Lower Town this afternoon, coming at it from the unlabeled east, and wondered what it was.

First thought was that it was a prison, second thought was that it was something religious, bearing a passing resemblance to the big Bruyère Hospital near where we are staying. There were also niches from which devotional statues may have been removed. We get to the front gate to find that it is the Embassy of the Peoples' Republic of China. Why on earth did they settle for such a grim place? Why all the security? The Kuwaitis manage things so much better at the other, western side of Lower Town.

Checking now with wikipedia, I find that the place was indeed a convent for the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

Reference 1: http://www.bruyere.org/ for the hospital, the top left of whose home page includes an example of the neat bilingualism mentioned in the postcript to http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/trolley-11.html.

Reference 2: good shepherds may be found at http://www.buonpastoreint.org/home. Google returns plenty of stuff for them, but it does not look very conventual, apart from the images, which do. Maybe they have pulled out of the convent business.