Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Just asking

I have a couple of questions that are at least tangentially related
to issues being brought up during this, the federal election season
here in Canada:

  • Education: Could somebody please tell me why standardized testing
    is supposed to be a bad thing? Keep in mind that I’m not talking about
    any specific standardized tests, but the actual concept itself, which
    seems to get a number of people’s knickers in a knot. I’m actually
    having trouble seeing why it’s as bad as the it’s-the-end-of-education
    crowd (whose Venn diagram circle has severe overlap with the I-majored-in-underwater-basketweaving crowd) says it is.

  • Toronto Island Bridge/Bizjet airport: Could somebody please tell me why the island bridge, if built, would do more harm than good? (I admit that I bounce back and forth on the Island Airport issue from month to month).

Feel free to use the comments; that’s what they’re there for.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Happy Birthday, Scott!

My co-worker and friend Scott Murff
— newest member of Tucows’ Research and Innovation group — turns the big three-oh today. In honour of
his birthday, his involvement in videogames and his fondness for Asia,
I dedicate this photo (which I found on HoopaJoop) to him:


Level up, yo! Clearly this is some secret level of Super Mario World that I missed.

Happy birthday, dude!

We’ll be celebrating his birthday tonight at the West Lounge Bar (510 King Street West, on the north side, just west of Bathurst). It’s a bit South Beach-y; this review says to dress up and be nice to the clipboard-carrying gatekeepers (who loved the accordion last time I was there).

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Smoke ’em while you got ’em

On June 1st — that’s less than two weeks away — Accordion City’s bars, billiard halls, bingo palaces, casinos and racetracks go smoke-free.

I’m looking forward not to depriving my friends of thier little
sucker’s habit (and it is a sucker’s habit, despite their protestations
and misguided belief that they are some kind of oppressed minority),
but to the ability to breathe inside bars and clubs, lower dry cleaning
bills and no longer getting burned by some fool accidentally butting
out on me.

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

GTABloggers Pub Night

Tomorrow night — Thursday May 13th — the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers will be having a pub night at the usual haunt: Paupers Pub. We’ll be celebrating that fact that spring has come to Accordion City as well as special LA guest blogger Kristine’s visit.

Pauper’s Pub is located at 539 Bloor Street West, deep in the heart of The Annex, a short walk from Bathurst subway station. We’ll be hanging out on the second floor from 7 p.m. onward.

Categories
It Happened to Me Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

A Little More About Saturday Night

Here are a couple of videos from last Saturday, a lovely evening spent with some GTABlogger buddies — Jeremy, Graig, Carla, Paul and special guest blogger from LA, Kristine — at the superfabulous and full-of-cute-well-dressed-women Drake Hotel.

The first one features Jeremy enjoying a glass of Couvoisier that Kristine had bought him. I’m the other voice in the video.


Livin’ in a rap video. Jeremy gets the Courvoisier passed to him.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.2 MB Quicktime ]

Jeremy later got to witness the power of the accordion. One of the
group of women (seen at the end of his video) asked me to take their
picture. My birthday senses were tingling, so I asked if one of them
was celebrating a birthday. They pointed out the birthday girl, I
strapped on the squeezebox, played Happy Birthday and won more converts to the Accordion Cause.


Later that evening, a guy asked me to play Happy Birthday for his buddy, who was celebrating the big four-oh. As a sign of his gratitude, he bought Paul and I a round of drinks.

There’s nothing like having a hand-powered machine that can turn music into free drinks, let me tell you.


I shot this video of the Drake lobby (and Graig Kent) shortly after
ther Unicorns’ pointless and possibly drug-affected performance.


Teeth-clenchingly hip. Graig tells us how much he loves the Drake Hotel.
[ Click on the picture to see the video — 1.0 MB Quicktime ]



Speaking of those turds on toast known as the Unicorns, a little Googling found me an article on the band in the upcoming issue of Macleans magazine. Here’s a snippet that explains everything:

The trio’s antics have only added to their
growing legend. They hired homeless people as fill-ins for a couple of
shows and claim to have eaten magic mushrooms in preparation for an
interview with the New York Times. Topping things off, the
bandmates gave away all of their possessions last August and moved into
an RV (which has since died) to live a transient beatnik-style
existence. They still don’t have a fixed address. “The nights are
cold,” says Diamonds, during a recent 3 a.m. interview in the parking
lot of a 7-Eleven in Toronto, “but you get to walk around a lot.”
Despite inhabiting a twisted fantasy world, the Unicorns have a pretty
good idea why things are going so well. “Girls start with horses, then
get into unicorns, and then nice boys,” says Tambeur. “We like to think
of ourselves as halfway between horses and nice boys.”

Halfway between horses and nice boys — yeah…on the IQ scale or the evolutionary ladder!

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

I can’t imagine it remaining there for long

I wrote about Ashley-Madison, the dating service for unfaithful married women and the slimy men who want to hook up with them back in August. My coworker James, who drives into Accordion City from the satellite city of Pickering via the Don Valley Parkway,

informs me that they have a new billboard near the “Downtown” exit. It

features a rear-view picture of a very relaxed man on a couch with his

arms folded behind his head in that “aaaaah” kind of way.

The kicker, however, is the caption inspired by the American Diary Farmers’ ad campaign slogan: “Got blowjob?”

Yeeeeesh.

Ashley-Madison have gone from scraping the bottom of the barrel to just

licking its underside. Naturally, the word “blowjob” on a billboard

will raise enough ire that it will get taken down in short order, but

that’s probably part of their tactic, which I like to call “stunt

advertising”.

Still, I’m curious. Can anyone get a picture of this?

Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Mickey Mouse Comic Strip

I have no idea why this billboard is up, but I like it. It’s a billboard hanging over the parking lot at the corner of Queen and Soho in Accordion City (across Queen Street from the Queen Street Gap and across Soho from The Black Bull) featuring an old Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip. To see the rest of the strip, check out the photo album.

Mebbe he’d like some, mebbe he wouldn’t. Click the photo to see the whole strip.