test blog 5

We are here ! Staying here . Going to this !  Also here , scene of many past celebrations. Ah, New York. And Bruce!! That is all.

If you're an app developer for MLB, or if you're with Roku or AppleTV, skip down to the final paragraphs! Because Allan and I follow an out-of-town baseball team, we subscribe to MLB.TV, and have done so for ages. As much as I dislike pay-per-TV services, being able to watch any baseball game at any time, with either the home or away feed, is amazing. Once we were able to do this by streaming, as opposed to through cable, the price went down and the quality went up. I've blogged many times about the wonder of the Roku streaming device, and how it solved so many issues for watching baseball, TV series, and movies. Last year, I learned that the Canadian streaming service CraveTV offers lots of Showtime and HBO content. Thanks to exclusive licensing deals, Crave is not available on Roku; it only streams on AppleTV. (You can watch on a computer or mobile device, but we don't like that.) So in order to get the additional Showtime and HBO content, we bought an AppleTV  devic...

Once again, Google has reduced the ease and functionality of Blogger. A while back, the layout of the Blogger dashboard changed. I used to be able to see an overview of all my blogs plus my "following" list on one dashboard page. I found this very useful, and I imagine that other users who also moderate more than one blog would have agreed. Now I can no longer check for and moderate comments on all blogs at the same time, and I no longer have one-stop-shopping for which blogs on my list have updated. For comments, I have to check each blog separately, necessitating many more clicks. For blogs I read, I had to subscribe to email updates, on blogs that offer this function. Not everyone does. (I don't like using feeds; I prefer to visit blogs and websites on their native platforms.) Next, Google discontinued the option to have comments on your own blog emailed to you. So, for example, if Allan put a bunch of comments through on wmtc, those comments would be emailed to me. I...

Court and Spark , 1974 Writing about the music of Joni Mitchell has been a huge challenge. My love of music and my writing abilities seem to live in separate spheres: I write with my brain, but I listen with my heart. If writing about Joni's music has been challenging, writing about Court and Spark feels impossible. The love and connection I feel for this music is impossible to put into words. So with that disclaimer, I will now attempt the impossible. Court and Spark is many Joni fans' favourite album. I mentioned that fans over a certain age seem to choose Blue ; fans under that age, those younger than the boomer generation, seem to gravitate towards Court and Spark . Listening to this music in retrospect, you can follow the very clear musical progression from Blue  to For the Roses  to Court and Spark . But in its day, no one could have been prepared for this masterpiece. On Court and Spark , Joni more fully realizes many threads that emerged on previous albums. The...

When the author Saul Bellow died in 2005 at the age of 90, I was saddened and disappointed by the scant attention paid to his passing. Bellow was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. His novels are still relevant, in a way that many of past generations are not. And his writing... his writing is simply astounding. With this in mind, and my love of nonfiction, I looked forward to reading  There Is Simply Too Much To Think About , a collection of Bellow's nonfiction. I assumed that Bellow's intelligence, insight, compassion, and precise command of language would make for some fascinating reading. I was right. The essays, speeches, and literary criticism collected in this volume display a towering intellect, but not a cold one. Bellow's view of the world is always humane and compassionate. He observes keenly, he understands deeply, but he also  feels  deeply. His gift is the ability to convey that feeling in a way that feels completely novel, bringing the reader n...

I've just re-read* one of my all-time favourites:  The Ax  by Donald Westlake. I'm agog with how much I love this book. But first, the requisite blather. * * * * One of my favourite kind of books -- although I don't read them frequently -- is a mystery, detective story, crime thriller, or spy thriller that transcends its genre and is also a literary novel. The definition of literary is always a bit squirrely -- and of course always somewhat subjective --  but in general, a genre novel is generally plot-driven, and follows a formula that readers of that genre recognize. The writing itself is not particularly important, and may be mediocre, passable, or worse. The best-selling titles in the genres I've mentioned are all about plot, pacing, and recognizable character types. But I just can't get past the writing. I can't stand reading mediocre writing, no matter how good the rest of the package. So for me, a crime, hard-boiled mystery, or spy novel, with an intrica...

It's TIHATL, Summer Reading Club edition! Summer Reading Club is in full swing in Canadian libraries. In more than 2,100 libraries around Canada, kids are earning prizes and recognition for reading. Thanks to Toronto Public Library and a certain sponsoring bank, we all have lots of free stuff to give away. The most popular kids' series ever, still going strong after almost 15 years. Our motives are simple: kids who read during the summer do better in school in September. SRC also helps remind parents of pre-readers to read with their little ones daily. Our children's library is very  busy. The first day of SRC, we signed up 180 kids! After two weeks, we're well over 600 participants. When kids register, or when they come in to "report" and collect prizes, it's a great time for some one-on-one conversations with our young customers. Some won't say one word without their parents' prompting, but others are so forthright and articulate! It's reall...