Shopping Carts in Ravines

Joe G sent me a link to an AAP paper about shopping cart-related injuries.
Abstract:

Shopping cart–related injuries to children are common and can result in severe injury or even death. Most injuries result from falls from carts or cart tip-overs, and injuries to the head and neck represent three fourths of cases. The current US standard for shopping carts should be revised to include clear and effective performance criteria to prevent falls from carts and cart tip-overs. Pediatricians have an important role as educators, researchers, and advocates to promote the prevention of these injuries.

I doubt I would’ve really noticed this Stikman outside the Italian consulate (Dundas, near the AGO) if I hadn’t just been reading about him the other day on Wooster Collective.

I found the Vancouver Sun article Get ready for oil supplies to dwindle, experts warn via Energy Bulletin. I don’t much like just using the entries on this site for blockquotes-n-links, but this bit of the article really caught me when I first read it and has been running through my head since. The article itself is sort of like an extremely condensed version of the oil depletion information provided in The End of Suburbia or Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over.

The basic notion is that the world’s oil producers are close to an absolute peak in terms of the volume of oil they can put onto the market in a given year.

Once that moment arrives, annual crude oil output will begin a long decline — with grim consequences for national economies.

Aleklett believes the peak could arrive as soon as 2008 — and that the struggle to adjust to the new energy reality could take 20 years, posing enormous challenges for developed nations.

Some observers suggest that the decline will prompt an economic and social meltdown on a scale last experienced in the Great Depression — or perhaps when the Black Death swept across Europe in 1347.

Even the International Energy Agency, which mulls global oil issues on behalf of Canada and 25 other developed countries including the United States, Great Britain and Japan, is exploring “barbarization” scenarios in which billions of people starve, national governments collapse, economies are forced to deindustrialize, and many regions of the world return to “semi-tribal or feudal social structures.”

“Oil wars are certainly not out of the question,” says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Link to article

Ryan pointed me to this Pop Carts short on YouTube.

There’ve been a number of skids of mysterious boxes sitting on the subway platform at Lawrence station. The TTC ought to know better than anyone that you can’t just leave things sitting around on the subway and expect them to be okay. Weeks later, they look like this, and are still just sitting around.

That black and blue thing inside does not really give me any hint as to what’s in the boxes.

Down at Coxwell and Gerrard, I found this bus shelter. As you can see in the background, my bus had just arrived and so I only had time to snap this shot and none to investigate. I don’t know where the plants were growing from, but good for them.

This is from the 24 Hours mainstream free daily newspaper (Sept 14, 2006), one on top of the other in this order, in an inch-wide sidebar.

ICE-LESS

For years scientists have worried about global warming melting Arctic sea ice in the balmy summer, but two new studies from NASA surprised scientists by finding that sea ice is now shrinking six per cent a year in the frigid winter, too.

CHOKE

A 32-year-old woman was in critical condition yesterday after choking during a marshmallow-eating contest at the Western Fair in London, Ont. Paramedics were called to the fairgrounds just after 7 p.m. Tuesday after the woman began to choke and collapsed. The unidentified woman was taking part in the Chubby Bunny contest, in which contestants stuff as many marshmallows as they can into their mouths.

Despite the fact that the first bit is about planetary collapse and the second one about a woman choking on a marshmallow, the second piece is twice as long.

I have found myself having really extreme luck at finding cool stuff on the ground lately. I found all these lighters over the course of the past week, plus around three more that I couldn’t find for the picture and another one that I gave away when I found it. I wouldn’t really call it luck, I think it’s just a matter of keeping my eyes open and being aware of my environment… with which comes the realization of how much produced in our society is discarded prematurely and wastefully.