More Lawyers, More Costs, More Secrecy
Monday night, council will once again scurry behind closed doors like cockroaches to avoid the light of public scrutiny to hear yet another virtual presentation from lawyers about the Saunderson…
Ian Chadwick
Are Cwood’s Symbolic Gestures Mere Platitudes?
I understand symbolic gestures: they’re what we do when we cannot change a situation, but want to express our anger, passion, compassion, outrage, sadness, support, angst, or other emotions. From…
Council Wants to Give Away Our Parkland to Strangers
On July 29, 2020, Councillor Jeffrey (the Queen of the Unlimited Expense Account), seconded by Councillor Hamelin made a motion to give away a very large piece of Harbourview Park…
Engineers Disagree With Water “Crisis” Report
In a letter dated July 2, 2021 to the CAO and the mayor, in response to staff report CAO 2021-10, two of Collingwood’s most respected engineering firms took exception to…
Is Bigger Better? In TVs, Maybe Not.
I read on several websites that for a distance of about 3.6 m (12 ft) from the screen to the viewer, the optimum size of a television should be 85…
The Cancer Diaries, Part 29
I began to write this post on the anniversary of my prostate surgery, July 8. Anniversaries are a time to reflect on the past and look to the future, even…
More on the Harbourview Park Dump
Speaking to some long-time Collingwood residents, I’ve learned a bit more about the dump that lies under the soil at Harbourview Park and is now proposed as the site of…
A Meeting of the Minds?
Niccolo Machiavelli and Michel de Montaigne never met, nor could they have — Machiavelli died six years before Montaigne was born, and they lived about 1,200 km (800 miles) apart…
Cwood’s Corroding Lampposts
First Street was so attractive when it was first rebuilt, about 15 years ago: all new and shiny infrastructure. But since then, it has been basically neglected and the inevitable…
They’re Paving Paradise to Put Up a Parking Lot
By now you’re aware that our council has approved a plan to destroy a large open, public space in Harbourview Park, and replace healthy grass and trees with an asphalt…
Council: Disarray, Disunited, Disrespectful
Chris Pott’s latest blog post, titled “Council in Major Disarray” captures in part the stumbling, bumbling, and fumbling in-fighting that has become endemic in our council and is now on…
More Council Secrecy, More Lawyers Paid
On Thursday, June 24, our council again scurried behind closed doors to do town business out of the light of public scrutiny. Oh, how they love doing their machinations in…
Failures in Cwood’s Typography and Design
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Hartley & Marks Publishers, 2001) I’m neither a graphic designer…
A Cup of Darjeeling
With characteristic brightness frequently likened to newly minted coins, fragrant aromas, and sophisticated, complex flavours — delicate, even flowery (more stem than petal, as one expert blender put it), with…
Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, and Kong
I’m not sure if I should be elated or disappointed after watching Godzilla vs. Kong (GvK), the latest film (2021) in the Legendary/Universal, Godzilla/MonsterVerse saga. That’s Kong, not King Kong,…
The Corrupt PC Nomination Process
This week, Stella Ambler, a former candidate for the nomination for the PC party in Simcoe Grey, sent an email that expressed her disappointment over the party’s authoritarian actions: On…
Chris Potts Nails It
Nailed it! In his latest blog post, former Town of Collingwood employee, Chris Potts writes about our council’s ill-conceived plan to hire a “climate change specialist” to add to the…
The Beatles: Songs and Lives
This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the…
More Secrecy, More Deception, More Conflicts
Once again our council scurried behind closed doors to discuss town business that should have been discussed in the open. But openness was never a watchword for this council. However,…
Musings on Reading Literature
There’s a passage from the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog (by Muriel Barbery, Europa Editions, 2008, p. 116-117) that so delighted me when I came across it that I…