On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Listening to this while checking temp companies and other job search resources...

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/connecting-in-isolation-indigenous-people-create-find-and-share-community-online-1.5510595

From the musical Come From Away as performed for Q on CBC Radio One back in 2018. Seems like a good moment for it. Most of my friendlist probably knows the premise of the musical, but short version for anyone caught unawares: the POV of the people of Gander, Newfoundland-Labrador when thousands of people flying to and from any number of places happened to have to land there on September 11, 2001.

You wouldn't have thought a musical worth seeing could be made of that premise, but they got'er done.

There is a stage play I watched with my mother at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, some months after my father died: Unity (1918). We saw it because the title and setting were linkages to my father's side of the family.

The end of World War One, leading as a contributing factor into the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918...

A distressing detail: the script is only available for sale in e-formats.

...I have to admit to some empathy for people in places like Minnesota, Oklahoma or Iowa.

So, it's good to come across things like this in The Guardian to show me more of their histories: Politicians pander to the 'folksy' midwest - but ignore the region's radical history - by Jessa Crispin.

So we're winding down an era of public transit history here on the Ottawa side of the river this weekend.

Route 95 was part of my life from the day I started taking classes at Algonquin. Since I live on the other end of the city - even pre-amalgamation, this was true - from the Baseline campus, Route 95 was an essential component of getting around town. Officially, I lived in Gloucester for the first year, Cumberland for the second, and my classes were in Nepean. But, still...it was all Ottawa, or it was all going to have to become one Ottawa eventually. Mike Harris' shotgun civic marriage plans in the works or not.

Route 95 was the glue that was binding them together. And now, supposedly, the O-Train Confederation Line is taking over from that. The vision is incomplete for now, but Phase 2 pre-construction tree-clearing and suchlike is underway. So that's going to happen. Barring a total disaster in federal and provincial funding not coming through, which...I suppose is possible in the next three weeks once the 2019 federal election is done.

It makes getting around town a little more complicated than it was. No more single-route bus-rides straight into Centretown and Lowertown West/ByWard Market and Sandy Hill.

It's going to take some adjustment.

Last weekend, I took a walking tour of Elmvale and Alta Vista. Towards the Elmvale end of things, there's a couple of streets named for title characters of Shakespeare's plays...





And the man himself who wrote those is commemorated in Vanier, a little ways north of Elmvale (using the oldest street-name sign that I could get a picture of):

I went to a market information session today at one of the non-profits trying to help people like me still looking for (steady/steadier) work. One of the people making presentations in connection with that session made a remark that's sticking with me right now:

"Ottawa is a small town pretending to be a big city."

I have an objection to that, if only because I've seen too much of the place over the past 35 years.

(35 years. I've lived in one city for that long. Yes.)

The Greenbelt encompassing the old core neighbourhoods can enable an illusion like that in the minds of many. The aggravation of there being neighbourhoods on the other side of the river-border Ontario shared with Québec also distorts reality somewhat, with all the side effects that the language laws of la belle province can provide. I accept that as a given. But Ottawa's big-city-ness is still more fact now than pretense.

I didn't know this was in the works at Centrepointe:

https://apt613.ca/youre-a-good-man-charlie-brown-at-centrepointe/

Should I go see this?

Should you?

https://apt613.ca/preview-the-omnibus-bill-by-darrah-teitel/

As someone with an interest in the history of street names, my thanks to rfmcdonald for putting this story from the Calgary Sprawl forward...

Quoting the author:

"Given these conflicts over roads and development, it’s hard to imagine the city changing its name, as the Stoneys and Piikani requested.

But what if we did? What if Calgary was still Calgary, but also Mohkinstsis (Blackfoot), and Wichispa Oyade (Nakoda), and Guts’ists’i (Tsuut’ina)—officially?"