My hometown of Peterborough, Ontario has approved a plan to build a chunk of the proposed Parkway expansion (a plan set on hold since the 1950's, with a referendum held in 2003), between Sherbrooke and Parkhill Rd. It was OK'ed by a 9 to 2 vote by our city counsellors and will go into action next summer, finishing in August, 2011. Luckily, this road will stop short of Jackson Park, one of Peterborough's largest and highly valued piece of green space.

The Peterborough Examiner almost jokingly wrote that the town hall meeting spent fifteen minutes disucssing this plan (valued at over $8.5 million in taxpayers money) while discussion of the future of the lawn bowling club took four hours.

Following the maps supplied by beyondtheparkway.org, we can see exactly where this road will be paved,

And overlayed with Google Maps, the road may look like this,

I'm not entirely sure of the environmental impact, but this showcases some of the plant life in the area. An effected citizen at the town hall meeting did raise her voice with concerns of disrupting bird migration in regards to the timing of the construction. Also, the road, will pave over the walkway besides St. Peter's High School and create and traffic and noise in the backyards of hundreds of residences.

As some of you may know, Joanna Newsom is one of my favourite artists and has been for years. She is a harpist from the United States, playing delicate yet complex pieces, slowly mastering her voice and writing long, intricate stories instead of more typical, short and catchy song lyrics. I saw her play in Toronto at the Phoenix Concert Theatre and love this review of her concert.

I would like to share some of her music from her album Have One On Me today. I hope you enjoy and look into purchasing her album.

Baby Birch

'81

Easy

Good Intentions Paving Company

Have One On Me

If anyone is interested in an English-only but localized World Cup 2010 Google Calendar, I found one. You can also download in XML, iCal or HTML. Just make sure that the calendar is properly adjusted for your timezone. Right now, it's set in America/Toronto (for me) but your's could be anything from this list.

For example, the URL ends with America/Toronto but if you're in Singapore, you might want to use Asia/Singapore. So change the end of the URL from America/Toronto to Asia/Singapore and hit enter. Now you can export the calendar into your timezone.

Good luck and enjoy World Cup 2010!