So bright.

Sigh.  I hold the sight of these blue skies dear.  I will have to try and conjure up this image (or I could just, you know, look at it) two months from now when the skies are always grey.

Look at how much I love him.  It’s gross isn’t it?

Toronto really is a beautiful place to be.

I like my asshole lips in this one.

Oh and then I spied a cupcake.  And my eyes got all anime big.

All gone mom.  I took my medicine like a good girl.  I want to erase that line it sounds so perverted.

I wish my life was like this everyday.  Surrounded by fluffy popcorn.  And my stupid face.

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Those geniuses over at Jelly Belly somehow were able to take how something SMELLED…and turn into a disgusting FLAVOUR.  Are you wanting to puke yet? Just get a load of these delicious flavours:

BABY WIPES PEOPLE.  The smell of perfume-y shit.  That is EXACTLY what that one tasted like.  I kept tasting it for the rest of the night.  That one was definitely the worst for me.

 

 

 

The rotten egg was a VERY close second.  Dave went a little green with that one. Because it tastes exactly how a rotten egg smells.  Our friend James had the privilege of tasting that one today, and he had to spit it out.  So nasty.  So genius.

 

 

 

Yup.  Booger.  Tastes like when one of those assholes dislodge themselves and take a little swan dive down your throat.  Nice and warm and salty.  A friend likened it to something else.  I will let you guess what that night be.

 

 

So because of trademark issues, they couldn’t actually name them Bertie Bott’s. So instead you get Bean Boozled…and man do you ever.  Did you notice that there are few delicious flavours thrown in there?  That’s so you don’t know which one you are going to get because the delicious ones look like the gross ones.

 

Behold:

Seriously….our faces say it all:

 

 

Most likely I just ate some shitty baby wipes.

 

So, if you are ever brave enough, you need to partake in this little adventure. Just make sure you have something to use as a chaser nearby.  Like 15 shots of vodka because that is how much you are going to need to erase the torture from your memory.

P.S- Guess who’s sister is coming to visit this weekend?  Guess who bought another little package of these treats?

Guess who is next on the Bean Boozled torture show?

Genius.  Jelly Belly…want to pay me to advertise for you?  Because I can vouch for how disgusting these are.

Call me!

 

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It was another perfect Summer day.

Happy birthday love of my life.

And then we were fascinated by this.  Man-made things growing out of trees are always fascinating.

Toronto is so green right now.

TRRRRAAAAAAIIIINNNNNN!

God this was sweet.  Italians and their lemon-y sweet drinks.  It was good!!

I had the penne a la vodka.  Another hit.  It had prosciutto in it…how can you go wrong?

Told Dave to sit on this wagon thing.  I wanted him to feel kin to something that was also as old as dirt.

Me on the other hand, I never age.  Sigh.

Awww.

Ghetto.

Good.

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And with that final vision in your head, I bid you all goodnight!

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Need to stretch.

Seriously though, where can I stretch?

Uh yeah it kind of hurt.

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Oh heeeey! My sister called.  Hi Krista! Guess what I am doing?

I am the barbecue goddess.  Roles are reversed in this household.

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Dinner with Chris at The Counter. Located at the Thompson Hotel.

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New York, you should be ashamed of yourself.

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Early to bed tonight!  Early wake up call in the morning.  I hope you are all having a lovely weekend!

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Christmas trees too — done, pack ‘em up and ship ‘em out. It’s over. Next up, my birthday in which I get to keep all my cash … yay!

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…dinner…

…at…

…Rol San.

I can’t in good conscience vouch for many of the spots that people call “establishments” around Toronto. Never went myself so I have to take them on their word.

Not the case with Rol San, though.

I distinctly recall visiting for the first time just over a decade ago. There were three of us and we sat at the front. I remember it being pretty decent.

My second visit was last night, and it was just like I had stepped into a time bubble. I think they got new chairs and possibly tables. Maybe a new painting or two. The staff may have changed but they haven’t changed their shirts.

The last time I was there I was quite a different person. Younger, more impressionable. More hungry.

This time around I sat a table facing my former self, ordered a mature portion of food, and had me some of that special tea. (The kind of tea you can’t get after hours in most places in Toronto.)

A single $10 dish is plenty for one person unless, like me, you prefer to put the food to the verity test — is it better the next day? This is particularly true of Chinese food — 24 hours is just about right for the MSG to truly penetrate the food.

Answer coming later today.

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O Smoke’s Poutine!
Our curds and gravy man!
Honest fries in all thy boxes tan.

With drown’ed spuds we fork thee up,
The True North obviously!

From far and wide,
O Canada, we know you love poutine.

French fried poutine gravy and curdy!
O Canada, we know you love poutine.

O Canada, we know you love poutine.

—

The official cold-weather anthem. Night nips these days – ‘fo ‘sho. Single digits at night. And moist. That rain again. Well, I believe that poutine can assist with this. I don’t believe anyone has ever attempted to prove poutine was in any way good for you so one should never be burdened with any delusions when consuming it. This also pretty much guarantees it’s delicious.

I got mine with sliced beef at a nearby Smoke’s.  One day I talked to a friend of Smoke Putinerie’s owner, Smoke Junior. The smiling sticker that continues to make the rounds around town are of Smoke Senior, in memoriam. Or so I’m led to believe.

They’re not glamorous locations, I feel I should mention. Often not staffed by glamorous people. But in the coming seasons, Smoke’s is a warm and tasty hearth on vast cold city nights.

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And a Grand Old Lady she is, probably because of all the foods that abound within the burgeoning fair. It’s the main reason I went this year! :)

To be more precise, I wanted to try the deep-fried butter being sold for the first time. Possibly the last. We’ll see where the coronary takes us. Yeah, you read that right: deep-fried butter. No tricky wording or false advertising here – you get four balls of chilled butter on the ends of toothpicks, coated in batter, plunged into hot oil for a few seconds, and drizzled with a variety of sweet sauces.

If your arteries don’t harden just looking at that then you’re not looking hard enough!

So what does deep-fried butter taste like? Fucking good.

The butter has a chance to fully melt into the surrounding batter by the time you eat it, so what you end up with is a buttery, ball-shaped puff of deep-fried batter. Yeah, not bad at all.

The chocolate covered bacon I can’t vouch for simply because I didn’t have any – maybe next year. Same goes for the deep-fried Mars / Twinkie bars; I have a lard limit and I still had to try Tiny Tom’s Donuts.

People are always a little shocked when I tell them I’ve never tried Tiny Tom’s – the place has been a CNE institution since anyone can remember and almost everyone has some sort of warm and fuzzy memory associated with the miniature treats.

And now I finally understand what makes them so popular.

The doughnut-making machines squirt little rings of batter into hot oil which is kept moving in an outward spiral. During their trip through the wash, the doughnuts have enough time to properly cook before plunking out onto a moving conveyor belt which ends right at the cash register. The bag they hand you has cooled just enough to keep you from getting scalded. Mmmm.

Funnel Cakes (first photo above), can be found just about anywhere there are carnies. They’re a nest of deep-fried dough covered with (one of more of), ice cream, preserved strawberries, icing sugar, apple goop, and honey. They’re called funnel cakes because the batter is squeezed into the hot oil out of a funnel.

Batter and hot oil; a certain theme begins to emerge after a while, doesn’t it? I believe you could deep-fry dog crap and still sell it on a stick. There’s something about the process that makes all food and food-like items good.

Of course, there are exceptions.

Note, however, that the blocks of ice cream must still be buttressed by waffles – another buttery batter. And if it’s absolutely necessary that oil / butter / fat and batter be kept out of the concoction, it should still have copious amounts of sugar.

Even simple things like popcorn are typically swimming in congealed cow fat … and to offset the lack of sugar, salt to wrest what little effort is left out of your overwrought taste buds.

One of the main reasons I find the CNE so quaint is that mixed among all these junky / junkie foods are antique delicacies that were probably the shit back when the Ex was still more or less an agricultural exhibition (with a fun fair attached).

I would expect to find old-timers lined up at these concession stands, folks for whom the penchant for liver ‘n onions has given way to dangerous culinary leanings these few days out of the year; yet it’s not unusual to find kids lined up for a smidgen of bratwurst or a slathering of Canadian back bacon.

These days, people I know who attend the CNE spend most of their time in the Food Building, a large honeycomb of food shops serving anything from Swiss Chalet to Khlav Khalash. It used to be about the rides and the farm animals, now it’s all about getting your gourmand on.

Gourmand is probably a strong word. It implies that there’s some sort of hoity-toity food snobbery going on, kinda hard to accomplish when you’re squatting down over any available hunk of grass to scarf down your meal. Gluttony is, perhaps, more accurate.

Plus, having food in your belly isn’t necessarily a fait accompli if one intends to engage in any other activity the CNE has to offer.

Continued in next part…

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Just as well – Ollie probably wouldn’t have taken well to it.

I finally managed to convince one of the agencies I work with that the term “independent contractor” isn’t merely a figure of speech (that and the liberal use of the term “employee” – why do I keep running into this?!), so I was looking forward to doing some work from home and mixing in healthy doses of blogging. But fate, being the filthy whore she is, pulled another steamy week out of her ass.

That window fan I’ve had going non-stop for about three months now has simply been circulating oven-like heat throughout my living room, over the exposed chassis of my computer and two surprisingly warm monitors (programming with just one monitor is a sort of punishment), and right back at my puffy, bloated face. Oh yeah, and it’s allergy season again.

Anyhow, I finally ran out of excuses tonight and took it to the streets.

Not that it’s significantly cooler, mind you. You know what they say, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity. I mean, they say a lot of stuff that’s asinine, but in this case it’s true. The only reason it’s slightly cooler is because the sun’s gone down; we’re all pretty much still swimming.

But it’s kinda nice to be outside at night. Lotsa stuff happens that I probably wouldn’t ever get to experience during the day. To begin with, there’s all that night-time work that takes place so that when we wake up, parts of the city have magically changed.

That and trash collection from all the public bins. Maybe it’s the lack of surly morning people (having just lugged their reeking receptacles to the curb), but the garbage men (no offense, ladies, but I haven’t seen any females on the job), all seem to be a lot more casual and chatty. One of them happily took me through the steps of unlocking and emptying one of those newer, gray, pedestal jobs with the foot-pedal-operated flaps. I don’t care what anybody says, I find that kinda stuff fascinating. I always hope that, one day, this knowledge will be put to the test in some sort of high-stakes trivia contest.

Not everything that happens at night is that thought-provoking, though.

While passing my locally renowned strip joint (seedy hotel and reputation attached), I was accosted by a tall ruddy-faced man with a thick moustache, tiny feather-adorned hat, and protruding belly, pronouncing, “Ya! Ich bin Randolph!” I was the only one beneath the marquee with him so I thought he was addressing me, but almost immediately he turned away and gazed at the entrance to the peeler bar. And remained that way.

Huh.

Shortly after this I stopped by George’s for a bit of rotisserie chicken.

George’s is another well-known local spot (the original of a few others scattered around town). For a fair price you get enough chicken to feed a small family, their dog, and a few relatives overseas, and there’s always an entertaining crackhead or prostitute in there to distract you while you wait for your bird. Tonight it was a trio of bike cops, one of whom was especially vocal and all “buddy” this and “yeah, eh?” that.

Once the tall verbose black officer and his cadre exited, George leaned over the counter and asked, “You know who that was?”

“Nope.”

“You know that officer that had the bubbles blown at him by that girl?”

I thought for a bit – there are so many!

“You mean at the G20 protests?”

“Yeah! That’s the guy!”

“Ha! Officer Bubbles … you don’t say.”

Yes indeed, Officer Bubbles’ beat is my neighbourhood. Small town.

So that was this evening. Okay, I know … no gun fight or exploding car chase, but it’s a sight more interesting than my days have been lately. Not to say Glade didn’t have its interesting aspects, but watching sparkles fall down the screen gets a little tired after the fiftieth time. Throw in some soupy heat and you’ve practically got monotony.

Right now, the night’s where it’s at!

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Oh, we already have the Greasy Danfurd now, in case you didn’t know, and it’s already something of a classic. It has hairy bare chests, gold medallions, girls names Roula / Toula / Voula / Koula / etc.-oula, and small, innocuous-looking elderly men that you just know are mob leaders of some sort.

It’s the Danforth, of course! And on the Danforth is that yearly tradition, the Taste of the Danforth. That’s the “Danfurd” part, and the Greeks are the “Greasy”, as in “Greece-y”.

It’s a theory, but one that I think will bear out. I believe the same’s happened with other foods / cultures. Take my favourite overpriced sourpuss, the passion fruit, for example.

In Mandarin, it’s called Bai-Shiang-Guo (pronounced like buy-young-grow), probably not an originally Chinese name. With the exception of the guo part (which means fruit), it sounds an awful lot like “passion” — buy-sh-young; no? Phonetically it makes sense. Literally it means “fruit of a hundred aromas” (bai=hundred, shiang=odour, smell, aroma), which mostly misses the horniness connotation: “Here, darling, have a smelly fruit.” Kinda like the Japanese word for chocolate – cho-ko-re-to – something to do with small cold cups of sugar. Where da cocoa at?!

So my theory is that the current “Greek Danforth” will be conflated somehow in the future and the original meaning, along with the original festival, will be lost in the annals of time like some kinda ancient civilization for which I have no example.

And I just know that some snot-nosed punk is gonna try to convince me that the Greasy Danfurd is actually named after some guy named Danfurd who was the first to put French fries in his Gyros; Gyros, of course, being named after Venetian flying machines; Venetians, if you read your history, being blind due to staring into the sun all day — just like Da Vinci, the first Gyro captain, original sky-bound blind dude, and pommes-frites-eating tickler of French fancies. That’s why he’s on display at the Louvre, naturellement.

It’s already kind of happening. I mean, the Danforth is still very much Greek-central, but the food festival is increasingly being infiltrated by unrelated participants – local colleges trying to recruit stooges, soy beverage pushers trying to get you to “enjoy” their samplers with your side of fatty lamb, even the cops trying to rustle up meaty volunteers. The point of Taste was for the local restaurant owners to set up in front of their shops and give the public cheap samplings of their Grecian delights. The Gyros, the Souvlaki, the Tsatsiki, they’re all still there — but for how long?

Well, this officially marks the second TCL anniversary at the eatfest so we’ll at least be able to mark the decline of this fascinating civilization. I mean, I’m sure it’ll be around for some time to come, but I’m equally sure it’ll be bastardized into something we might not readily recognize. “Greece? Nah, don’t like it. Olivia Newton-John grates on my nerves.”

Last year, as I recall, it was a lot more festival-y; kids’ rides, slides, menacing clowns. So this year I managed to talk my mom, sis, and her minions into coming down for the afternoon, only to crush their spirits with a lacklustre Taste. The weather didn’t even have the decency to stay respectable.

I should’ve known something was up when Thai food started showing up along the street. Oh well. At least Toronto has a bazillion other food festivals to attend; shame but I think Taste has been on the grill too long.

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I do my best to try to warn people that, no really, it gets pretty fucking hot here in the summers, but usually I just get an incredulous expression in response. When I compare recent Toronto temperatures (31 Celcius  / 88 Fahrenheit) to, say, The Bahamas (30 Celcius / 86 Fahrenheit), they just kind of look at me funny, like maybe I’ve been spending too much time in the igloo or something.

It’s a bit warm for May, granted, but not by much.

“Yeah, but it’s not a humid heat like they get on the islands”, is often the next follow-up. Once again, spoken by someone who hasn’t been to Toronto in the summer. No, it really is. It can get as soupy here as it does in Hong Kong or Jamaica. I mean, did you ever wonder how south Asians, East Indians, West Indians, and people from similar countries could manage to live in Toronto if it’s some dreary northern podunk town? That’s because it’s not so foreign to them. In the winter they’re usually a miserable bunch, but in the summer they’re right at home. Right from the horse’s mouth that.

As you can see, the wise people of Yonge-Dundas Square prudently decided to air Bollywood films a couple of nights ago as part of their free summer events. Open air, foreign language, spicy food, crowd, heat, humidity – it was as perfect as could be hoped for. The fact that it was conveniently in the middle of town helped too. :)

Unlike many more southerly cities, however, Toronto goes well below the freezing mark every winter, and as every good Canadian knows, frozen water can be very damaging. It warms and gets into every crevice, then it freezes and makes that crevice much worse. Stones can sometimes literally be split in two, and every spring during the thaw, trees and sides of buildings tend to come down.

As a stout Torontonian you must be prepared to deal with tropical heat, arctic blasts, and all manner of inclement weather in between. In the summer you’re dealing with humidity and heat, in the winter it’s the cold and dryness. In that way, there’s a little flavour there for everyone.

But hey, if you can’t take it you can always move to a more temperate place like Vancouver. Wimp!

So yeah, I think that Toronto owes much of its ethnic flavour to the weather. Everyone has a favourite season, a month or two in which they delight in the weather. No matter how you like it, you’ll get a good dose of it. And everyone has their dark days too, when hibernation would really come in handy.

But in order to be an attractive metropolis to people from all over the world, as we seem to be, our weather needs to also be imported from the edges of the world, as would also seem to be the case.

You know that old illustration that cartographers used to indicate oceanic winds? You know, the old dude with a billowing beard, puffed out cheeks, and a swirl of wind emanating from his puckered lips. That would be, like, the Indian Ocean trade wind, or something?

I think that guy, crossed with an equally antique compass illustration, would make a fine flag for the city of Toronto. There’s really no way to make it less misogynist apart from appending breasts – just smack ‘em on there – so I say don’t worry about it. Plus, if we can find an old illustration with a chick wind, why not? Basically, be aware that while under this flag, you may suddenly find yourself anywhere in the world in a pretty authentic way.

It’s mostly to imply that what you get here is not only the culture of your homeland but also the climate, whether you happened to have lived in unbelievably hot Indonesia or desolately frigid nothern Russia. Okay, maybe not that extreme, but more comfortable. At least for a time.

But anyone who decides to stay here for more than a couple of weeks has to be prepared for a journey of discovery that can sometimes be a little more extreme than they could’ve imagined. More than one Vancouverite I’ve known were aghast when confronted with a Toronto November, a cold winter back home. They were both equally horrified when told that it gets much worse than that. Calgarians laugh at our inability to deal with snow (and they’re probably right to do so), but more than one of them has expressed surprise at the amount of snow we sometimes get.

Unfortunately, I’ve yet to figure out a way to capture atmosphere in photos. I look at some of the old stuff on TCL and remember quite vividly how hot and intense Caribana really was, for example. Proper weather for a festival like that, I’m sure everyone agreed. But aside from the skimpy outfits, you can’t really see the waves of heat rising from the road or see what it’s doing to the poor black albino dude standing at the side watching, partying, melting. Ouch.

Anyhow, wear layers (all weather), and carry a sturdy umbrella. That’s the best I can tell ya. And welcome to Toronto!

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The whole synesthetic experience must’ve started when I was still doing my ex-pat thing overseas. It was on the tropical island of Taiwan where winter temperatures hardly dipped below 10 Celsius (50 Fahrenheit), and the summers we non-stop steam baths regularly hitting 40 Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), that I  first made the association. After a few years of that, the link between summer heat and fried food musta just burned into my brain, I guess.

The fried food part of the equation is my favourite Taiwanese breakfast, usually eaten in small roadside shops surrounded by greasy steam and greasier customers.

The three most common meals at such establishment are, as I recall, lobogau, diced fried daikon (giant white radish), congee, a cold soup consisting of rice, some kind of shredded meat, and a variety of veggie / nut toppings, and dan bing, which I’ll be discussing here and the only thing that I actually enjoyed in the mornings. (Fried radish — gross!)

The name dan bing comes from the Mandarin words “ji dan” (chicken eggs), and “bing” (platter or plate – or ice if mispronounced). It’s usually accompanied by “nai cha”, literally “milk tea”, but with whitener being used instead of real milk — for a variety of reasons. Incidentally, this is also the secret ingredient in Tea Shop 168’s milk teas, unsurprisingly since this is also a Taiwanese company. (With tapioca in the milk tea –  buble milk tea — it’s called “jinju nai cha”.)

Dan bing is super easy to make:

The “oriental pancake”, the bing,  is something like a crepe. It’s made of wheat, rice flour, sesame, and occasionally sprinkled with sesame seeds (yum); pretty simple but I’ve never had the patience to try to make it by hand. Especially since a package so cheap at T&T.

Besides this, you’ll need the ji dan, of course, a little oil, and soya paste.

Now this last ingredient is extremely important. Don’t use soya sauce – it’ll taste awful. Soya paste is sweeter, less salty, and dip-compatible. There are many soya sauces and glazes available; you probably won’t go wrong with most of them but the fewer the ingredients on the label, the more authentic it’ll be:

Also, I’d recommend not using anything fermented – it’s an acquired taste.

So from here on in we’re cooking Chinese breakfast nook style – fast and furious. Heat up that pan, toss a bit of oil in, and throw in a scrambled ji dan:

While dancing and gyrating wildly, throw your bing in the air, then toss it like you just don’t care. On the pan. The dancing / gyrating motions aren’t entirely necessary but the meal won’t be nearly as elaborate without them.

You’ll want the bing to stick to the ji dan so don’t use too much oil, and make sure the ji dan is still a bit runny before throwing the pancake on top.

Cook for a few seconds until the two are stuck together, or the bing has achieved old people skin consistency, then  flip over and cook the other side. Not too much – you now have to roll it into a tube so it must remain flexible.

Once you’ve got your dan bing rolls, simply chop them up into bite-sized pieces with the spatula – it’s a chopstick meal – and drizzle with sauce. Or dip. Whatever turns you on.

I find that two dan bings usually do the job for me in the morning, and I can typically go from raw ingredients to my belly in under five minutes. Fast, simple, tasty food that bears an overbearing olfactory resemblance to tropical summers. And the name is fun to say too. :)

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This year the city’s shipping in Euro-crazies for the summer, doing a mayoral throw-down, plus all the other usual seasonal stuff that’s supposed to happen. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

One day at a time.

And by the way, if you’re ever eating Fiddleheads, steam or boil those suckers first. I won’t go into detail but two of us spent many hours ejecting vile green masses and bile from our retching stomachs. Otherwise the baby ferns tasted quite pleasant. They’re in season for only about a week; they say three in the fridge but they start to unfurl in there and get all leafy and bitter — blech – straight into the trash.

Early risers like strawberries and asparagus should start showing up soon if fern isn’t to your liking. After that we should start seeing beans and potatoes, then tomatoes herbs and squashes, and finally apples, pears, peaches, and other fruits. I probably also missed a couple or dozen fruits and vegetables in there. When they’re in season, they really are much better.

Okay, you got me, I spent the day booting around St. Lawrence Market replenishing some much-needed stock. It was dark and grayny today so there wasn’t much else to do – the city felt a bit like a ghost town. One of those days when staying under the covers isn’t such a bad idea, you know? Did I ever suggest that statutory holidays be based on the weather? The first mayoral candidate to take that and run with it automatically gets my vote.

Probably won’t be Rob Ford though. That guy just got a one-two sucker punch; first some comments he made a few years ago about gay people are thrown at his face by Furious George (I believe I did mention how both George’s bulldogged qualities and his homosexuality would be to his advantage), then Rob gets publicly scolded by the integrity commissioner for revealing how much the city was planning to pay for some house.

I suspect this won’t deter him, though – he’ll just have to get his shit together for the next salvo. Whoever’s running the campaign might want to start maybe talking to Rob and get to know him; find out a little more about the candidate. It seems obvious to me but maybe that’s just the nature of municipal politics. Maybe meat just likes to get roasted.

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*cough*

*hack*

Doctor says I might be able to get back to it tomorrow. And if experience has taught us anything, professional advice should never be questioned. Thanks for dropping by, dear reader, and be sure to grab some hand sanitizer on the way out. (Haha! like it’s gonna help.)

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To begin with, a bunch of personalities from my wake-up radio station were axed, en masse, this afternoon. I’ve only ever heard promos for the Motts’ show and I accidentally tuned into a Michael Coren repeat one night. Didn’t care for it. And Jacqui Delaney I found to be as awkwardly appended to my daily dose of waking petulance, the Bill Carroll Show, as the spelling of her name, and this clause. Plus, she was kind of abrasive.

But I wish them all well. It’s not always easy out there on the streets.

Take the Carties, for example. Almost everyone agreed that the concept was great; let’s have some alternatives out there on the streets instead of just the ubiquitous hot dog stand. The city clenched their butt cheeks extra hard on the requirements and only eight finalists (out of twelve entries), were accepted into the program. They had to pay a ridiculous sum for the carts which were sold, and branded, by the city. The vendors also had to wear city-issue uniforms. Oh, and the city told them where they would go and conduct their business. Some locations were great. Some, not so much.

There were also suggestions that the city might want to, you know, have a chat with existing street vendors to see how they do things. Kinda pick the brains of some of the people who have done this day in, day out, for decades.

Yeah … no, they didn’t do that.

I once bought a samosa from one of the a la Cart guys. His little shack was impeccably clean, almost too much so. He probably had the city’s sanitation inspectors living in his colon. The food was okay, nothing too exciting; proper City-Hall, middle-of-the-road flavour. And what’s this about handling every little thing with a pair of gloves on? With street meat, you get a dollar-store serviette (as dainty as the word implies), holding up a propane-soaked bun which is cradling a hastily warmed specimen of “dog” of some sort. “Hot” it most certainly is not. No latex glove, that’s for sure.

It’s almost inevitable then that the Carties would start dropping off, isn’t it?

Sad.

But Buskerfest helped me forget all about it! The name says it all; a street carnival filled with buskers. Open guitar cases, hats, plastic cups, and other collection receptacles abounded.

One of the performers flew in from overseas. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say somewhere in the region of Australia:

Strangely, this is as exciting as it got. At least for me. In the ten minutes or so that I stood there, the routine seemed to go nowhere. Those knives never saw any action. I still don’t know why those people were lying there. I waited, I applauded; tried to cheer him on. Nada.

Oh well.

Elsewhere, some of the buskers had so much polish, they were like some kinda disco machines:

It may not be to everyone’s liking, but everyone’s gotta make a living somehow. Even the very tall and gangly:

The evening ended with a rousing human beatbox, but that video is still being transjiggamafied. I hope this will suffice until then:

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I had somehow managed to forget just how much of a punch this kind of weather delivers. I spent four years living on a proper tropical island and I can say with some authority that Toronto’s summer is not unlike a tropical one. It’s hot, sticky, humid, and relentless. I like the challenge – see how far I can walk before I pass out from dehydration – but Ollie tends to take a more pragmatic approach:

I took the day off today to be a tour guide to my folks and a Czech student they’re showing around. We hit some of the more air-conditioned locations such as the PATH, the lakeshore, and the Toronto Reference Library.

I particularly enjoyed the reactions to the Korean BBQ lunch. If you’ve never been, imagine the hubcap from a small car sticking out from the middle of a restaurant table on which you cook your own prepped food (usually meat). Most places heat it using a gas line that runs up through the centre of the table, but more elegant places use lye beneath the cooking plate – kinda like a fondue setup.

During the lunchtime conversation, the word “exotic” was used more than once. “Good” also. I’d add “inoffensive” as long as you stay away from the kimchi – I’m just not a big fan of fermented cabbage. I mean, I know what I like and it’s allowed my weight to hover above average, so I think I know what I’m talking about here. It’s the same reason I never trust that skinny chefs will ever produce anything really tasty. It simply … can’t be.

Luckily, the chefs along the Taste of the Danforth route yesterday were, for the most part, not svelte. There were plenty of beefy characters serving up beefy skewers. And chicken. And pork.

The short stretch of Danforth Avenue essentially had all its Greek and Mediterranean shops (and every other shop in between), spill their food onto the street for sampling. At most places you got a meaty skewer for $3 and for $5 you got the skewer on a gyro with veggies and tzatziki.

The idea behind Taste is pretty simple; stuff your face the entire way, and then do it again on the way back:

It’s a flawed concept; it’s just not possible. I got through two skewers, one gyro, and one cob of corn before I threw in the towel. I didn’t even have room for baklava, and I don’t remember the last time this has happened.

Maybe I’m just getting old. I mean, with the liquor stops along the way being off-limits due to the heat, I felt like that didn’t leave much else for the adults. Okay, that’s not entirely true; there’s plenty of music to get down and dance a Greek-ish jig to:

The gentleman waving the flags is Mr.Canada, as emblazoned on his custom-made maple leaf suit. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to ask him anything as he kept scooping up ladies out of the audience and entertaining them with his flag dance:

It had a semaphoric quality about it; stiffly elegant and clearly sending out all sorts of unintended signals. Guess you can’t blame the guy, it was just as hot during Taste as it is today and the fact that he made any sort of effort should be applauded. The fact that he wore that suit on that day … well, maybe he should see someone about that. I mean, I wasn’t dressed very sensibly myself, and I was a puddle (I layered, just too much!).

Next year I’ll take a note from the Danforth’s regulars and keep it simple, classic, and timeless:

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I recognize that it’s been pretty monotonous around here lately, hasn’t it? It’s not like the combative strike by the 416/79 has paralyzed the city! Let’s see what else is happening around town.

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And I’m back! Through the wonder of digital technology, I was able to perform the kind of modern miracle of science grandpa would have voided his bowels over: turn a hyphen into three hours.

I’d intended to head down to Ontario Place for the fireworks but in this day of have-nots, it seemed rather indulgent. That was just fine though because on my way I ran into a few interesting places like the Jazz Festival. Not so much a festival as an extended concert for really relaxed people:

I managed to sneak my slight frame behind one of the tent flaps to watch Brandi Disterheft pouring out a gentle “In my solitude”. Dave Brubeck was around somewhere too, just not where I was. In hindsight, I would have loved to cut a rug with Medeski Martin & Wood, but I won’t let regret rule my life. The if-onlys are the things that kill you: if only I’d heard of the festival sooner; if only I’d read the entertainment section more; if only I’d practiced safe sex and worn those damn shin guards. If only.

I wandered away from the square and bumped into my old buddy Steve Mann, hydraulophone guy and seemingly retired cyborg:

Steve is a hero; the only man who can get women all wet by touching his worm in public. I know it’s blue, but it’s better than the green one (yep, still down there – eww!)

Anyhow,  that subject is probably best left to sit in the sun and gather flies. Just as well because I was getting a bit weary of listening to Steve explain (for the third time) the inner workings of the instrument to two people (Mr. Whitey ensemble at the right + guest) who had asked the same question (verbatim) three times. No! The water doesn’t activate electronic actuators! What is wrong with you two?! He just told you it doesn’t! God!

I could actually taste the bitterness subside as I headed back home. I stopped at a lonely a la cart guy in front of Metro Hall to buy a lukewarm veggie samosa. At two bucks it was a greasy good deal, but not really much personality. That was a bit further uptown in front of Metropolitan where I found a bunch of chess players slapping clocks and talking trash:

One of them had a fist raised to the other, growling for “revenge!”. Perhaps jokingly, but I knew that full-contact Aussie rules chess was imminent. I got out of there fast, past overstuffed garbage bins and noticeable roadside litter, as fast as my little legs could carry me. What a night!

Maybe not in that exact order but … what a night!

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