Atomium in Motion

Atomium in Motion is a trippy highly filtered afternoon at Brussels most famous 1958 World's Far exhibit.

The Atomium is a landmark building in Brussels (Belgium), originally constructed for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair (Expo 58). It consists of spheres connected by tubes that represent an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times. It is now a museum. A vintage Herman Miller Marshmallow sofa is among the many period pieces on display.

CP Railway crossing Leaside Bridge at West Don over ET Seton park

CP Railway freight train crossing the Leaside Bridge at West Don over ET Seton park. This is the double-tracked CP mainline. These shipping containers could be headed east the Port of Montreal for shipping to Europe or Asia.

Eglise Saint Severin

Eglise Saint Severin
1 Rue des Prêtres Saint-Séverin
75005 Paris, France

You’re a hoarder too

Your house is a mausoleum to your own family. Everything in it is a memory of some aspect of your family’s life. And now that you’ve gotten married, had careers, raised the children and retired, that story of life has become history. Your house has gone from a place where life occurred to a place where the next chapter that awaits is death.

Why am I so harsh about this shrine to yourself. Let’s take a tour. We start in the kitchen, with the refrigerator. Oh look, it’s covered in children’s drawings. Today they’re by the grandchildren but the fridge first hosted the work of your children. And where has that work gone? Is it in a box, on a shelf in the basement just off the rec room? Or is it in the attic? Are the mice turning it into nests for their babies?

What of the dining room? I admire your handsome dining room suite. Although it’s more than a little out-of-date. And yet it’s not hip enough to be retro. If you had to sell it you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone to take it. And you’ll never get what it’s worth.

You and your spouse may think that the children will want it. After all, it’s from the mausoleum. It’s part of the archived legacy of how your family became the people we see today. But without even knowing your children, I can tell you that you’re thinking is way off. It stands to reason that if your children are old enough to have careers, spouses a home then they’ve already furnished the dining room with a suite. And it’s up-to-date. Not old and tired.

The living room is next. The TV’s up-to-date. It’s a nice model and has some of the latest features. But your 80+ inches of home cinema would take up two walls in your children’s condos. And besides, they already have a TV. Or they watch Netflix on their laptops.

Then there’s the sofa, and the side chairs, and the coffee table, and the end tables, and the lamps. All worn out and tired. It costs more than it’s worth to have it re-covered. No charity will take it. The grandchildren going off to college can’t fit any of it in their bachelor pads.

Now what really ties the room together is that Persian carpet. Timeless. But if you have one Persian carpet and two children then you have an argument, not a bequest.

Next Up: The bedrooms.

Think of COVID-19 as glitter...

Dr.Ken McGrath provides us with this great analogy for the spread of COVID-19...

Have you ever come into contact with glitter? Like hugged or shaken hands with someone who was wearing or using it? And how for the next two weeks it hangs around forever and ends up on surfaces you can't recall touching, and places you can't image it ever getting, and seems to be there even after showering and washing?

Think of COVID-19 as glitter.

We’ve noticed you're a good customer. If that continues, we will soon have to unsubscribe you.

On Friday the 1st I made a shopping list. Saturday the 2nd I loaded some tempting offers on one of my loyalty cards. On Sunday the 3rd I went on a spree and purchased 125 dollars of Health & Beauty Aids. Creams. Lotions. Ointments. Products that make your dull hair shiny. Products that make you shiny skin dull. Stuff that I needed. Because I had carefully chosen the promotional offer that suited my needs, I was rewarded with over 18,000 bonus points. Nice.

On Monday the 4th I went to pick up something at the post office of that same store. And I remembered I needed some bar soap. Cha-ching, another 120 points. Here, I thought, was a merchant who really gets it. I'm spending money I usually spend at other retailers here, at this store, because of the rewards. And, frankly – d'uh. That's how a loyalty program works.

So imagine my surprise later this week when I got home and opened this email:

“Are you still there?
Hello!
We’ve noticed you haven't opened our emails in a while. If there continues to be no activity, we will soon have to unsubscribe your email address.”

I was going to be fired as a customer. For using my loyalty card to buy hundreds of dollars of merchandise at their store!

How can they have created a stack where, even though I am loading offers on my phone from my emails into their app, and buying products on both a promotional-driven and a daily needs basis, there is some feed that cannot see any of those transactions and decides to fire me as a customer?

This is a retailer whose marketing department is staffed by people who are not in the first quartile of any cohort.

The moral of the story is “watch your stack”. Don't pull a data feed of customers to fire without parsing a feed that shows you customers that have just purchased. In fact, better yet – don't fire your customers using a loyalty program.

BTW worst of all, the only way to re-enroll in the program is to follow phishing-scam style links to dodgy login pages. Priceless.

And PPS. Of course I can't send them an email capturing the above information. Their loyalty campaign emails are do-not-reply.

The Search for General Tso...

There's been a trend since the turn of the Century (or Millennium, if you prefer) to examine the story of the Chinese diaspora in North America in terms of restaurants. Young Chinese are exploring their own cultural heritage via the lens of a menu.

Here's a link to Karen Tam's 2006 Installation at YYZ Gallery: Shangri-La Caf: A Division
of Gold Mountain Restaurant.

In Canada the first wave of immigrants from China built the CPR. Every navvy camp (to use the historically correct and fortunately ethnically-neutral term) had a group of men who cooked traditional meals for the work crews. Obtaining certain items was always an issue.

Food issues were often the cause of work stoppage and job actions. Some Chinese would drop off the railroad and open a restaurant in whatever prairie town they happened to be in. Stepping out from that center, those millennial artists observe that Chinese-Canadian cuisine was the first Fusion cuisine. Also, these restaurants were seen as a tasty window on the exotic East. In that sense it presages the fascination with all things Egyptian that occurred after the successful Howard Carter-Lord Carnarvon opening of Tut's tomb.