[URBAN NOTE] What do you do about abusive TTC workers?

Last night, I and several dozen others had a rather unpleasant encounter with a bus driver who, after finding out that horn was blaring because of some sort of mechanical fault, began screaming and swearing at the passengers for a couple of minutes until he managed to turn off the horn (two minutes?).

This morning, I filed a complaint with the TTC over his behaviour. TTC workers certainly deserve respect, but so do their passengers. I wasn't sure where to go, but Google took me to the very helpful "TTC Complaints, Compliments and Suggestions" page.

By mail; write to:
TTC Customer Service
1900 Yonge Street,
Toronto, Ontario, M4S 1Z2

By phone; call us at
416-393-3030
Business weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

* Via fax at:
416-488-5773

I was told by the helpful worker that I had to submit a written description of the incident within twenty days, preferably within the week.

In addition, there are two pages relevant, one form allowing people to submit complaints about employees in general or unknown employees, the other for identifiable individual employees.

Quite a few Torontonians have witnessed--of perhaps even suffered--abuse from TTC workers. Maybe it's time that this should stop.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the lobster

The humble lobster
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

I took the above picture at the Water-Prince Corner Store, a nice little place in downtown Charlottetown that shold have the market in seafood cornered. The seafood that it's particularly good with is the American lobster, a bottom-dwelling crustacean that lives "in cold, shallow waters where there are many rocks and other places to hide from predators and is both solitary and nocturnal." The export of lobsters means that it's relatively easy to find them, but I'd estimate prices in Prince Edward Island are between one-third and one-half of Toronto prices. There's a reason that people lining up in the departures area of the Charlottetown airport are taking refrigerated lobsters with them.

Are lobsters a threatened species? One wouldn't think so, since the human-caused catastrophe on the Grand Banks, eliminated their natural predator, the codfish. And yet, in the waters of the Northumberland Strait lying south of Prince Edward Island, numbers are falling. It doesn't seem as if the use of pesticides is to blame, as in parts of New England. Rather, simple overfishing--in particular, the collection of fertile lobsters during their breeding season--is to blame.

Once upon a time, lobsters were so unpopular that fishers saw nothing wrong with the idea of using excess lobsters as fertilizer. Only poor children brought lobster sandwiches to school; rich kids ate roast beef sandwiches. Is it a minor irony that the improved status of the lobster is coinciding with what seems to be a lobster population collapse?

[LINK] "Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire"

Over at Far Outliers, Joel has a provocative post "Rise and Fall of the Comanche Empire" that copies significant sections of a review of a new book on the Comanche American Indians, Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire. In this review, Flynn cites Hämäläinen's apparently well-documented claims that as early as the mid-18th century, the Comanche controlled a vast empire encompassing a very large chunk of central North America, with raiding parties at times making it nearly as far south as Mexico City. The westward expansion of the United States and economic problems doomed this empire by the mid-19th century, in Hämäläinen's reading, but when it existed the empire does seem to have been a glorious achievement.