I know I’ve written about that hateful little troll, Toronto Sun’s Sue-Ann Levy, before, but now that the one man that could make her forget she’s gay (Rob Ford), has gotten off on a technicality, she is in full-on murder-everyone-who-doesn’t agree-with-you mode.

No, it’s not a “right” or “left” thing, Conservative versus Liberal thing (how did all the “Commies” suddenly become Liberals anyways?!), it’s an asshole versus reasonable human being thing. I mean, if she’s so hot for gambling and prostitutes and all the other crap Ford wants to swaddle the city with, why doesn’t she walk on down to the nearest street corner and spread that musty cavern of hers? Oh, right, it’s because she would have to do what she demands that everyone else do.

Because, you know, there is simply no other way for the government to make money, despite the offensive deposition Ford put everyone through while he was (we can only guess), snorting coke in some back room and completely ignoring everyone’s ideas. I know the coke thing is a rumour, but I’ve had enough experience with drugs to see that this is probably the case — the sweating, the holier-than-thou attitude, the confrontationalism, the ruddy face, etc. Chances of Rob snorting: very high.

Just to be clear, just because he may do drugs wouldn’t necessarily make Rob an awful person (except that he is), but I’m pretty damn sure he should not be holding office under the influence, driving under the influence, etc.

And the “technicality” term being tossed around? People like Levy love to use that word when describing how the mayor snubbed his nose at all the rules and laws of our city multiple times, or how he directly, knowingly, and willfully voted on something directly and monetarily affecting him. Those are “technicalities”, but the fact that Toronto Council wasn’t supposed to have imposed a punishment (hence the loss of the entire case), is not a technicality, that’s JUSTICE!

That’s also precisely how murderers, rapists, and drug dealers get away with it — legal technicalities are a criminal’s best friend.

But, you know, Levy’s just fine with that. People shouldn’t be held to account. Whoring out your daughters is a wonderful future for them. Getting into drinking and gambling, why, that’s practically next to godliness. Shouldn’t be surprising then that this creature passing for a woman would now be chastising Councillor Ana Bailao for her drunken driving charge, right? After all, drinking and gambling is precisely what we want in this town, so anyone who does it should immediately lose their job. (I’m sorry if this is twisting your brain — this is a Ford-lover we’re talking about here)

I happen to agree somewhat, drinking and driving is bad. Somewhat worse than, say, Ford driving while reading, or threatening the lives of passengers on a streetcar by plowing past its open doors, but the Ford-supporter hypocrisy is flying its true, shit-brown colours by defending Ford’s complete lack of regret and remorse (not even a hint of apology or a thought to changing his ways). Bailao drank and drove, potentially endangering many people on the road…the guillotine for her! Ford drove distractedly and dangerously an multiple occasions, unapologetically and directly endangering people on and off the road…oh, he just made a mistake; let’s use tax money and get him a driver!

And this is pretty much the Ford / Harper / etc. camp philosophy in a nutshell. It’s a philosophy that turns on others with the most outrageous slanders, hatred, and vitriol — remember Ford / Cherry’s inaugural speech? Of course, if you call them so much as “silly” they’ll call for your public hanging. They openly and gleefully promote vice, crime, selfishness, greed, money money money, me me me, to the exception of everything else, push on with bullheaded ideas despite any planning or consultation, and are basically oblivious to anything but their own whiny needs. And none of these characteristics are incongruous — these are just simply vile, offensive, pin-headed people. If you want to be nice, “petulant adult-children” works too.

The really sad part is that these people are so blind to basic human concepts like faith, charity, love, and kindness, that they’re willing to forfeit their entire family’s future on a momentary status gain. It’s all about feeding the overly swollen ego — me, me, me! And for some reason, they think that in the groups of selfish, uncaring, self-loving aggressors they move in, that they’re going to achieve some sort of universal love and acceptance from everyone by beating them down, insulting them, and making their lives miserable.

It’s really not that complicated…

Psychopathy: is a personality disorder that has been variously characterized by shallow emotions (including reduced fear, a lack of empathy, and stress tolerance), coldheartedness, egocentricity, superficial charm, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, criminality, antisocial behavior, a lack of remorse, and a parasitic lifestyle.

Okay, so I just made up a word for the title. I think, dear reader, you will find it quite apt toward the end of this series as we get down and gritty with Kensington Market, the motherless whore of Babylon. Alright, maybe not that bad, but still pretty gritty, at least for Toronto.

Before I start, and in case you’re wondering, I keep making these in series simply because I end up with a molehilly mountain of photos that I can’t deliver all in one go (a further bunch sits unused in my “keepers” folder). I would not subject you to a twenty megabyte download, dear reader. That’s rude. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, let me just say I’m concerned about not abusing your hard-earned time. Especially not with lengthy and, ultimately, completely unnecessary spiels about how I wouldn’t abuse your time. I mean, wouldn’t I be wasting your time by alerting you, in a wastefully lengthy manner, to the fact that I’m trying not to waste your time? Aren’t I doing that right now through the use of excessively wordy questions? And any apology I could offer would now be adding insult to injury because I’m just stretching it out even more? And why am I still going on knowing all of this?

Recursive introspection, it’s not just for breakfast anymore. :D

But the trip to the market did have a bit of a serious note to it though. At least for a little while.

Of course, if you see something like this on the street, it is incumbent on you to stop and gape. So I did.

Dead? Mugged? No, just plain old alkeehol. One reclining woman and one reposed man doing his thing on the warm vent grate. The thing being him being passed out.

Momentarily, a somewhat dishevelled gentleman propped himself up against the wall I was against. He pulled his open coat behind his back with his right hand, his left making a boozily odd angle with the wall, and he leaned in slowly saying, “that’s my woman over there.” “Oh, yeah?”, I replied, partially expecting him to commence the pummeling he was holding at the ready back there for the offense I had just committed (I don’t think the details matter that much when you’re drunk).

Instead, he continued, “yeah, I can’t go over there cuz I’m drunk.” Well now there’s a pickle, isn’t it? What does one do with a statement like that? “Oh yeah?”, I replied.

“Yeah, I’m drunk, and that’s my woman. I can’t go over there right now. Oh shit, they’re not taking her?”

I guess he’d been expecting the emergency crew to gurney her up along with the snoozing dude and get her to a warm place, but she made that one classic mistake that all amateur streetfolk do: sitting up making slurringly idle chatter with the paramedics. Not really an emergency at that point, so no hospital bed.

“Well, at least she’s alright”, I tried to console him. “That’s my woman over there”, he insisted. “Right, I got that”, I nodded back.

The conversation didn’t pick up much after that. But, thankfully, the ambulance packed up and left, so the man was free to lumber back across the street to his woman where, I’m sure, he reminded her that she was his woman. Probably also informed her that he was drunk.

That was my cue and I double-timed it toward Chinatown (and Kensington Market).

Chinatown is also gritty. And I don’t mean the trash, that’s kinda normal. You have the trash, the grimy streets, the graffiti; even the most illustrious establishments are tagged up like it’s going outta style.

Oh but please don’t let me mislead you, dear reader, I think gritty’s great. I may not be able to read MC Snuhrb’s tag on yonder wall, but it certainly adds to the ambiance. The ramshackle nature of the whole area makes me think that it could all be torn down in a matter of hours and replaced with something of equally wonky construction. So much stuff … so precariously perched. Exciting!

But that’s Chinatown. Let’s see how all those European immigrants do it, shall we? On to the market!

Continued in next part…

It happened again! When I read the story, I knew something about it sounded really familiar.

And it was.

Basically, some old guy in Barrie decided to clean the busy street in front of his house using his snow blower. In the middle of the afternoon commute. Inebriated. Police had to arrest him for his own protection. Oh the podunkery.

Similar to the earlier incident in Keswick where a fellow was caught riding his mower all over the road, also pickled. Also hilarious.

Keswick is north-east of Toronto, Barrie north-west. Both are picturesque and both have that sex-with-the-cousin-behind-the-barn kinda feel to them.

I’ll grant that Barrie is a large city so that’s a broad generalization, and it’s increasingly common for people to commute to Toronto from there. Citytv’s Kevin Frankish makes the drive every day although with his crazy TV hours he probably doesn’t get to experience the nightmare that is the 400 commute. I mean, if the 401 is hell on four wheels then I figure the 400 has to be at least at the nightmarish level, no? The Toronto Star clocked the average speed on Toronto highways at 42 kilometres (26 miles) per hour. The speed limit is 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour.

If the road was running at 100% capacity — as envisioned back in the early fifties when everyone had one and a half grotesque kids (the half would have to be, wouldn’t they?), a sparkly new highway stretched out to the future just behind your back yard, and dad smoked a pipe — everyone should still be able to drive at the limit, albeit surrounded by their neighbours. However, because of the marvellous correlation to percentages, we can easily see that the highways of today are running at 158% capacity (every kilometre in speed lost is a percent in capacity gained). At 200%, the commute will cease to be.

That’s kind of the funny thing about all those people who complain about how unfair life is for them as drivers; they have a lot of compelling points, I won’t take that away from them, but who cares? It’s obviously untenable and not getting any better. Doesn’t matter what I say about it. Doesn’t matter what they say about it. You either start preparing for some Mad Max action or you take alternative measures. Now I, personally, prefer to walk. But if there’s going to be some awesome rolling carnage along the Don Valley Parkway, I’d be down with that too. As a spectator.

Oh, and speaking of really familiar (skilfully referring back to the top), do you remember the five-cent plastic bag fee that started back in June? Seems like a lot of people missed the news – I still hear it being called a tax. Nothing could be further from the truth, dear reader! It is a fee, put into place by the city, but collected – and used – by the retailers. Not a penny goes to the city; the shop owners are supposed to decide what to do with all those pretty shiny nickels.

This wasn’t as a result of an outcry from shopkeepers who were losing money on bags, it was put in by City Hall to try to cut down their overall use (and disposal). And that part has worked pretty well. But lots of people questioned why the city wasn’t collecting that money (or at least a part of it). They’re doing it in Washington DC, and it seems to be working well for them. Telling a businessman that he can put up a bunch of new swings around the corner with the money he’s collected is kind of like telling a monkey he could write Shakespeare with a banana. We all know exactly what that businessman is going to do with that banana. No, government must step in and snatch the banana from that spiteful monkey’s hands.

And to back up my assertions, I offer up the cases of Weizhen Tang and Stan Grmovsek. Tang is accused of running a ponzi scheme – take from a new “customer” and give part of that to existing ones, repeat – and Stan got mixed up with a bunch of no-good Bay Street types in an insider trading affair. They corrupted an innocent lawyer!

Who knows what the city could do with that money; new mass transit, better roads, alcohol treatment centres. They could even sponsor the Don Valley Parkway Drive-Till-You-Die competition – how many birds would that stone kill, huh?

Let me start by laying it all out on the table.

The Macallan Scotch tasting that I was invited to yesterday was put on by word-of-mouth advertising agency Matchstick.  The idea behind hosting the event was obviously to provide some publicity for the whisky through blogging / social media / etc., but I want to assure you that it fell well within my guidelines for ethical and responsible shilling. The agency, insists that anyone attending their events is honest and upfront about it, and I wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

TCL isn’t about confessions or selling stuff, but it’s important that you know who was involved, and for what purpose. And that I’ve killed people.

There, clean conscience, ready to imbibe — just the way God wants it. :D

So, instead of just yammering on about booze, I thought that the best way to get into the evening would be to take you along.

I knew bupkis about Whisky when I arrived at the swanky Yorkville hotel. I mean, I’d drank whisky before but had more experience with the sticky tape version of Scotch than with the liquid one. So the first thing that Mark, our host, did was to explain that whisky is Scotch, Scotch is whisky. Only Scotch proper comes from Scotland.

Next, he went on a jovial story in a heavy Quebecois about how thrilled that he, as an avid whisky drinker, was to land this job with Macallan. He really seemed quite pleased about it.

Mark looks a bit of a greedy money-grubbing banker in the photo above, doesn’t he? But no, he’s just genuinely pleased at the prospect of sipping on expensive whisky all evening; it’s glee.

… Continue Reading

Breasts, bikes, and beer; the triumvirate of alliterative seduction is now complete!

At around this time last year, the Rickard’s beer company (one of a number Molson‘s subsidiaries), introduced a white wheat beer that I had absolutely no interest in. It’s not that I don’t enjoy beer but my interest in it wanes, much like my interest in full-time employment. Currently, it’s waxing.

Usually I imbibe my alcoholic beverages with deep political convictions; a pint of Guinness with a sipping shot of B52, for example. Rickard’s White, though, doesn’t really make a statement other than “I taste good” — which it does.

White ale, if you’re not familiar with it, is an unfiltered beer (hence the cloudiness), that has orange peel and coriander added to it to produce a slightly citrusy flavour. Unlike lager, ale is fermented more quickly and at room temperature (lager’s kept cold).

I’ve poured all sorts of fermented crap down my gullet and this drink is truly inoffensive. The slice of orange (sometimes lemon), shown in the photo is how it’s served at various pubs around Toronto. Friday afternoon’s tart and bitter post-work bitch-outs at Shoeless Joe’s just wouldn’t be possible without it.

I’m hardly a scholar of beer and it’s fair to say that the term “enthusiast” wouldn’t apply to me, but I can recommend this one. It’s the gateway drug of the legal alcohol world.

If I could leave just one parting note to our American neighbours, I would point out that Canadian beer tends to contain a man-level of alcohol (5.5%+), so take your time. And for the rest of you who may be wondering why this entry is uncharactersitically short, you will find your answer at the bottom of my pint glass.

Cheers!