i was just in canada, and i noticed that a mcdonald’s had a maple leaf on the golden arches logo. then i saw a denny’s with a maple leaf in place of the apostrophe. i knew there had to be a silly reason for that and lo and behold wikipedia had the answer.
“Several national chains (e.g. McDonald's Canada, Wendy's Canada) use the maple leaf in place of a possessive apostrophe in their company logo, in order to have consistent branding across the country while complying with Quebec's Official Language Act (as the French language does not use this punctuation).” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_leaf)
quebec’s official language act requires that all commercial signage use french. even france, a nation known for its stringent guidelines on language and grammar, isn’t as strict about commercial language use as quebec. (side note: i was also recently in france and more and more of their advertizing has english in large print and french smaller at the bottom. maybe the québécois have a point about language preservation.)
this quote by rebecca solnit from the final chapter of city for sale: the transformation of san francisco by chester hartman (the only one i had time to read at jenni and claire’s before one yuri nguyen disrupted me).
this place has been one of the great laboratories for broadening and transforming our understanding of human rights, justice, economics, work, gender, sexuality, the natural world. … san francisco has been not only the great refugee for the nation’s pariahs and non-conformists; it has been the breeding ground for new ideas, more and movements social, political and artistic. to see the space in which those things were incubated homogenized into just another place for overpaid-but-overworked producer-consumers is to witness a great loss, not only for the experimentalists, but for the world that has benefited from the better experiments (and been entertained by the sillier ones). civic life and cultural life everywhere are in decline because of the acceleration of work… and the public sphere itself is more and more merely the space people pass through errands and commutes…. the accelerated and equipped…carry their private space with them, and privatization becomes not just an economic issue but a social attitude (expressed in such items as car alarms, which place the right of private property in public over the auditory peace of the neighborhood)…. the sense of the city as home is eroding as the public sphere ceases to be a place where people feel at home … the new arrivals seem to live in it as though it were a suburb. one has the sense that san francisco… is populated by people who just don’t get urbanism or just don’t value it. urban life… requires a certain leisure, … a certain willingness to engage with the unknown and unpredictable. for those who feel impelled to accelerate, the unknown and the unpredictable are interference as the city’s public space becomes not a place to be but a place to traverse as rapidly as possible.
long quote i know, and i don’t think this phenomenon is limited to san francisco.
machines for living. i went to the villa savoye in poissy a couple of weeks ago, got an audio guide, and listened to le courbusier’s “five points of architecture” as i walked around the house. he called this house a “machine for living in” and believed that our homes should help us live harmoniously. he achieved this through his open designs and practical built-ins; his homes have a remarkable interplay with the outdoors. the idea that your home should be comfortable and efficient without mentioning much by the way of home appliances that we think of as modern amenities (ac, dishwater, laundry machine) is still radical today. i’d somewhat discounted the importance of architects who focus on single-family homes, but visiting the villa savoye made me rethink how we can take things from these homes and implement them on a large scale.
the politics of international football (soccer). the european championship and copa america tournaments are happening right now. even if you are not a football fan there is so much to learn about european and north/south american politics from the teams and the fans. from french superstar kylian mbappé urging young people to vote for the left to a türkiye player facing a two match suspension for celebrating his goals with a hand gesture associated with a far-right group, there’s a lot to learn about politics through the lens of football. i will admit that i am not following the copa america as closely, and, unsurprisingly, most soccer journalism is eurocentric, making it a little harder to find the similar stories that i know must exist.
embracing boredom. we are all constantly being fed information and stimuli. expected to be on and available all the time. i’m slowing down to feel bored; it’s the perfect time of year for it, even if only for a weekend. take a digestion walk, but instead of digesting food, digest life.
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