Category: In the News

Photo courtesy of Toronto Buses.

I feel for Brad Ross, long-time spokesperson for the City of Toronto and now Director of Corporate Communications for Accordion City’s public transit system, the TTC. He has to put up with smartasses like me needling the TTC for a lack of originality in their signage, and in the past week, he has to help manage the PR fallout from some notable mishaps on the TTC’s surface routes:

• This morning: a head-on collision between two streetcars (one going west, the other supposed to be going east, but turning north) near Bay and Dundas streets. Given that streetcars are restricted to the rails on which they run, you almost have to try before there’s any possibility of a head-on collision.
• Yesterday morning: A bus driver suffers “a seizure or some other medical problem”, causing the bus to swerve, smash into a median, a light pole, and several parked cabs, finally coming to a stop a kilometre away when it hit a tree.
• Last Tuesday: A bus driver was charged with drunk driving after a passenger, concerned about the way the driver was behaving, called the police on a mobile phone. The driver was instructed to drop off all the passengers and police were dispatched. He was issued a breathalyzer test and found to be over the legal limit and was both arrested and fired.

For my limited communications with Brad and from reading the papers, I know that Brad’s a straight-talking, articulate and responsive guy, which is what the TTC is going to need in light of this week’s surface route troubles. I wish him all the best — this isn’t going to be an easy week.

Siouxsie Sioux.

Yet another sign I’m getting old: an alt-rock icon from my teen years turned 51 today — Susan Janet Ballion, better known to the world as Siouxsie Sioux (pronounced “Suzie Sue”). She and her band, Siouxsie the Banshees, were a mainstay of my music collection, and if you were a regular at Clark Hall Pub (the engineering pub at Crazy Go Nuts University) during my 1989 – 1994 DJ run, you’d probably hear one of the singles during my alt-rock sets. Somewhere in my parents’ basement is a near-complete collection of Siouxsie and the Banshees vinyl LPs; I’ll have to dig them up sometime.

In her honour, here are some Siouxsie and the Banshees videos for your enjoyment. Happy birthday, Siouxsie!

Here’s Hong Kong Garden by Siouxie and the Banshees, from 1978:

And now, some Siouxsie and the Banshees numbers from my teen years, the eighties. I’ll start with Christine from 1980:

Here’s Cities in Dust, from 1985:

Here’s their 1983 cover of Dear Prudence, which made it to a number of my mix tapes:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you the video for the one Siouxsie and the Banshees number that featured an accordion (or at least a very well-synthesized accordion): Peek-a-Boo, from 1988…

And finally, here’s Kiss Them for Me, from 1991, the Lollapalooza era:

My friend Stacy tagged me with this little “Meme of Five” thing, and I decided to go along. Here are the rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

And now, my answers…

What were you doing five years ago?

Me at the Naked News party, 2003.

I was:

• Dealing with the fall-out from The Girl Who Cried Webmaster, an identity thief whom I dated very, very briefly. After her, I established my “no dating girls with LiveJournals” rule.
• Interviewing for a job at Tucows.
• The usual (for that era) girl trouble and other random weirdness.
• Hanging out with LizVang at the Canadian Idol auditions.
• Giving directions to strip bars.
• Comtemplating pimp-slapping the people at the Bell store.
• Being mistaken for legal aid.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?

1. Continue writing specifications for a couple of projects at b5media.
2. Drop off my bike for a tune-up at West Side Cycle.
3. Pack for my trip.
4. Deposit my tax refund cheque.
5. Kill Clarence the drug dealer for crooked cop Francis McReary in Grand Theft Auto IV.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Oreo Blizzard from the world’s most oddly-located Dairy Queen at the Dragon City mall here in Accordion City, down the street from the office, deep in the heart of Lactose Intolerance Central.
2. Chocolate chip cookies from Le Gourmand.
3. Fruit from Fresh and Wild.
4. Coffee yogourt.
5. Two small 70-cent chicken pies from Ding Dong Pastries.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
(not in order of action folks!)

1. Two chicks at the same time.
2. Set up some investments to make the money continue to work for me. Give some deserving charities nice fat cheques.
3. Take a big steamy dump on this PC laptop and buy myself a Mac. Reimburse b5media for the laptop I just pooped on, too.
4. Buy houses in Toronto, Boston and Manila and float between all three. Pay off any outstanding debt on my sister’s, mom’s and in-laws’ houses. Buy my brother-in-law Andy Ramoniac and his wife Sue a house.
5. Roland FR-7 V-accordion synthesizer, baby!

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Tendency to bite my thumbnails when deep in thought, annoyed or stressed.
2. I check my email and IM too often.
3. Tendency to overthink and over-edit what I write.
4. Diet Coke.
5. Tendency to make wildly inappropriate, lurid or so-weird-it-silences-the-room remarks.

What are five places where you have lived?

1. Manila, Philippines: My place of birth.
2. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.: My first home in North America. I was there before Wendy was!
3. San Francisco, California, U.S.A.: I lived here during the dot-com bubble.
4. Accordion City: The city in which I’ve lived the longest. I came here in 1975.
5. Kingston, Ontario, Canada: Where I lived during the Crazy Go Nuts University years.

What are five jobs you’ve had?

Me playing accordion on the bar at the nightclub “The Living Room”.

1. Computer programmer. It’s something I’ve wanted to be since the seventh grade.
2. Technical evangelist. A role that I landed partially because of the accordion and had from 2000 through 2007, first at OpenCola, then at Tucows.
3. Project manager. My current job at b5media.
4. Snow-cone street vendor. There are some interesting stories from that time that I haven’t blogged yet.
5. Go-go dancer, pictured above. I bailed after a couple of weeks because my weekends were no longer my own, but I had a good time, and ladies did actually stuff bill down my pants. That’s why I didn’t have a bachelor party — most of my thirties was a bachelor party!