If you look at the top of the sidebar you’ll notice the flipping Twitter feed and, occasionally, some of those updates link to TwitPic photos. These are taken by a spunky Samsung BlackJack the Second in the battlefield. Or the mall. Wherever the phone happens to be. Unfortunately, the quality could be better. Much better. But it’s a camera phone so all I can do is my best.

Besides, the TwitPic feed is meant as filler for, and sometimes preview of, the next post; not as a replacement. Something to look at while the blog takes a nap. I mean, if I don’t have that, I end up with posts bearing titles like, “A bunch of stuff I found on the sidewalk”, on a Saturday on which it’s obvious I’m just trying to fill up the hole in the pavement that is my blog.

Poor metaphors as well.

Oh, and I know it’s impossible to read the map (subpar photography too), but it has Church Street at it’s center with Yonge to the left and Jarvis the right. The northern city limit in 1858 was Bloor Street. It’s definitely not anymore.

Yorkville just seems like it’s been around forever. It’s probably that whole set-in-stone thing. It makes anything seem dignified.

Okay, yeah, she made it big. But on dubious credentials. Two dubious credentials.

There are a few other names strewn about the place too.

Having things stuck into sidewalks always struck me as somewhat ironic. On the one hand, yes, you are honouring that person by devoting this lasting memorial to them. On the other hand, you’re inviting people to walk all over it, spit on it, etc. Maybe there is no irony there at all. Maybe that’s exactly what’s intended. Cool.

But I won’t keep you staring at the pavement, dear reader. I’ve got a date with some themes and some prodding to do on TwitPic. No promises here, but I won’t be using the sidewalk as my subject for at least two posts after this. It would be too obvious.

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That’s what happens when I’m knackered and I’ve spent most of the night swooping around the financial district in Street View instead of posting! Oh well, if you’ll forgive a few sentences that don’t quite seem to make sense, we’ll be able get through this.

Man, I wish Google never came out with Street View. Between every few words … I manage to travel another couple of blocks.

It’s been thirty minutes since my last sentence!

Back in the olden days they wouldn’t have had these frivolous time wasters. The men with their genitals exposed to the raw atmosphere had enough to occupy their time.

The Royal Alex isn’t one of those locations that’s changed much. Guys are still freezing their nuts off out there.

The next random location — just because it happens to be a few steps down the street doesn’t mean it’s not random! — the next random location I decided on for comparison was the Elephant and Castle across the street from Roy Thomson Hall. In this case, there was a world of difference between then and now.

I figured I’d include something in the picture that I could match to something in the archives. Luckily, I was right. It’s the black building in the above photo that stands in the spot where the building below stood.

Hahaha! What the hell was that?! No one’s getting drunk in that podunk town!

Wow. Thank God we’ve progressed so far.

Savages.

Compare the genteel stoicism of the modern city…

…with the barbaric, angled-for-impalement twenties.

I mean, I like old buildings, just not those mud-covered rectangular bunkers where manual labourers came to die. But, most of those have been demolished and replaced with more interesting buildings, so it all worked out in the end.

The reason I brought this up was that Street View back then would have sucked donkey balls. Major. It’s almost as if back then they really wouldn’t have had a need for any modern technology. Wouldn’t be much to use it on. Horses’d still stink. Mud and dog feces’d still be indistinguishable from one another. No bikinis anywhere.

I don’t know what those people were thinking, but at least we seem to have gotten it together a bit more since then.

The only piece missing now is that sleep I mentioned at the beginning.

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It’s here. Street View is here.

The loss of productivity in Toronto this morning must’ve been staggering; into the billions I bet. Once you start flying around the city, it’s kinda hard to stop. I know I was on a tour of my neighbourhood for hours.

Addictive, packed to the rafters with photos, and backed by Google; TCL’s so screwed. How the hell am I supposed to compete with that?!

As a minor consolation, it took the Google car a really long time to capture the whole city, so maybe I can produce something more up-to-date. Well, eventually.

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You tried the Street View thing, didn’t you?

See? It’s hard to resist. But until Google figures out how to incorporate street festivals or higher resolution dead musicians, at least there’s some hope.

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I’m also glad that the Google car seems to have avoided alleys and sidewalks. It saved the lives of thousands of pedestrians, but more importantly, it left a small window of opportunity for something unique.

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*sigh*

Why do they always have to pick on the little guy? Just when I thought I was getting the hang of this blogging thing, along come Larry and Sergey and kick me in the painful bits.

What did I ever do to them?!

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Attention: Councillor Kyle Rae,

Sir,

With all due respect, you’re a jerk. I’ve enclosed a reduced photo of you to demonstrate this fact. To you.

I wake up to Bill Carroll on CFRB every morning. I could wake up to The Edge or CHIN but I don’t. Do you know why? Because I don’t necessarily enjoy the music. Or understand the words.  But not because I think that the audience are skanks! Or whatever it is that you were implying:

“And the cruel vengeance of fate is he has to talk to the listeners of CFRB.”

I understand that you and Mr. Tory, to whom you were referring, may have had some political encounters in the past. However, your trysts had nothing to do with me or CFRB’s audience. Spiteful public jealousy does not behoove a politician, sir. And if you have a problem with John talking to us, take it up with him!

Disregards,
Patrick

Dear Bill Carroll,

Sir,

With all due respect, oh no! I can’t believe they’re moving you to 9 a.m. I mean, great that you get to wake up later and have a longer time slot, but I’m not sure about this John Moore fellow that’s replacing you. (I’ve enclosed a photo of him looking rather menacing — he says he doesn’t like cats!)

I hope he can muster the same incensed outbursts at, well, anything like you can. I doubt he’ll be able to evoke the same enraged, torch-bearing, city-razing rabble that your rants do during my struggle with consciousness.

Will he be able to adopt the same seething indignation at even the most inane topics like you, Mr. Carroll?  And I hope you take this as the compliment it is, but your hair-trigger City Hall temper is awe-inspiring. Sir, you are a champion. I would name my cat after you but Oliver Carroll sounds too Dickensian.

Perhaps one day, when this nutty day job of mine is behind me, I can set set my alarm to nine o’clock and wake up refreshed and angry like I used to. Until then, I’ll wearily hold your memory in a petulant little piece of my heart.

Blubberingly,
Patrick

Dear Tess Kalinowski,

Madam,

With all due respect, what the hell?! I was ready with that Toronto subway post a couple of days ago; where were you?! I thought we were supposed to put them both up at the same time. You know, cross-promotion; I link to your story and you link to mine. That was the plan.

But no, I guess your story on the new Sheppard West subway station design was more important.

It could have been so poignant, your spanky new airport terminal of a station against my musty old Bloor-Danforth ones. Mix in a couple of the Transit Commission’s screw-ups like the new transit maps with all the errors, and the under-priced monthly pass that’s losing them money, and we could’ve caused a tidal wave in the media! Think of the brouhaha that this would’ve started. We could’ve singlehandedly taken down the entire Commission!

Now we’ve lost our window of opportunity. It’s best if you disavow any knowledge of me. Pity you chose the route you took; you’ll always be just a transportation reporter.

Regretfully,
Patrick

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I’m fairly certain I’ve mentioned this before but walking around the city is the cat’s puss.

Not only do you not have to hunt down and maim ever-scarcer parking (the fight with the rival in front of the spot is the maim part), but you don’t even have to find a pole to strap your bike to. You wanna go there, you just go!

Also, it allows you to meet up with fellow walking enthusiasts like the pleasant young Brazilian ladies I played tour guide to today. No matter what angle you looked at that walking from, it looked really good. (I must apologize, I’ve been extremely negligent in my duty to carry a camera. I will try to rectify the situation post-haste.)

I probably shouldn’t go any farther with that, I blush easily. But I will say that my zeal for walking has been greatly rejuvenated. The tourists are sometimes just as, if not more, interesting than the natives. And they’re just walking around like it’s nobody’s business. Awesome!

In a way, we kind of owe much of this to map makers. Especially those who produce maps for tourists. Most of the visitors are on foot while the maps are focused on streets. Great if you’re in a car, but not very informational for someone who can travel a much wider area on foot.

A while ago I was toying with the idea of how a walking map might be different from a driving map. What kind of data should be on there that already isn’t and would also be useful to pedestrians?

Well, for one, I thought, why not mark all areas that are accessible to pedestrians? Lots that can be walked through; breaks between buildings that are not roads (pedestrian alleys); paths through buildings that are generally open to the public (why go around when you can go through?); that kind of stuff.

Here’s an example where the green overlay demonstrates all pedestrian accessible areas.

That covers a lot more ground than a car, even though this map is actually missing a lot of detail; areas indoors and under/over the ground that you could also use to get around, for starters.

Meh. It’s Thursday.

I saw an example walking map in Spacing Wire a while ago but grading sidewalks as “pleasant” or “unpleasant” struck me as genuinely useless. I personally found some of their “unpleasant” sections extremely enjoyable. You’d think for a magazine dedicated to thinking about such stuff, they would’ve had a few good ideas.

Now, as regards the tourist population of the city, I’m not suggesting that we would ever export such maps; what I’m thinking is that we use the guides domestically to give the appearance of being extremely knowledgeable about the city. Breaking the ice could be as simple as, “Hey! Can I show you around in that alley back there!”

Let me explain using of an illustration. For this you need to think B-I-G.

First envision a fat person, I mean really big; the kind of extended circumference for which the words “morbidly obese” barely scratch the surface; the kind of rotund that results in, basically, a giant ball with tiny projections that were once the appendages.

This person would have fashioned for them a sturdy steel girdle that would encircle their girth and provide a hard outter support for the gelatinous mass underneath.

Now take this person, somehow, to a place on Yonge street just south of Highway 401; some spot on the road with a good decline. This last part is crucial because it is this hill that would impart the required momentum to our gargantuan friend.

With the girdle supporting the ball’s innards (the person would be on their side), all it should need is a good strong push and…see you in the lake!

The momentum gained on the first hill, coupled with the sheer weight of our subject, should be enough to overcome the minor dimples and valleys along Yonge street and land him or her in the sparkling waters of the lake.

This is due to the simple fact that Toronto literally moves downward as it moves south. As you travel in this direction along most of the major city streets, you can see the foundations of buildings growing taller in order to keep the structures level. And it isn’t slight either; most buildings will have an extra three or four feet added to them at their southern end.

As long as our massive abomination continues to roll in a straight line, there should always be more downward hill further along to speed his or her progress.

I suppose this experiment could also work with a giant steel ball or a heavy car. I suppose.

Whether it’s corpulence or giant balls of steel, in Toronto all will roll down as they roll south. When you go downtown, you will really be going down to town. And if you wish to travel down south, you will also be generally correct (it’s a little south-east, really).

Besides this natural wayfinding feature, the city also has a grid layout that can either be hindrance or a real time saver.

Because of the unsightly bulge in the southern end of the city core, a number of the roads that run close to the waterfront have to either veer north or simply end. King and Queen streets, for example, run roughly parallel until they join together at Roncesvalles in the west. As they separate in the eastbound direction, the move further apart and new streets like Adelaide and Richmond rump up the increasing space between them.

So if you’re travelling west and south through the city, don’t bother with the south part. Most streets go south-west already.

I remember working at an ill-fated coffee shop in the base of the Toronto Reference Library many years ago. A gentleman came in and purchased a small cup of coffee, took a sip, instantly ingratiated himself with me by complaining about how weak Canadian coffee was, and then asked directions to the nearest Canadian Tire.

I told him it was just north of us.

“What is it with this north south crap with you Canadians? You all carry a compass or something?”, he half-joked.

“Never eat shredded wheat, biatch!”, I replied.

Well, biatch wasn’t a word at that time; but I wish I’d said that!

(…for those of you who recognized Kirby from the front cover — when I used front covers, you may enjoy this greeting card: http://gaygamer.net/images/kirby.jpg — DO NOT ask how I ended up on that site.)

Nerdness implies a more profound enlistment of less tangible, but more powerful, traits: the ability to hypnotically cause others to lose all sense of self and surroundings through a dark power called “work talk”;  the skill to instantly and deeply connect with anyone who thinks that the word “nybble” is funnier after learning what it means; the cojones to wax non-commital* in such a way that a deeply engaging chat can continue for upwards of thirty minutes.

The men and women that together comprise this second group are the people who could turn into super villains so easy, it’s best that we do everything we can to push them toward the good side. I am, of course, talking about Saturday morning library patrons, of which I am occasionally one.

So I speak from experience. I too have bathed in my own inner turmoil, distanced by those I had tried to help and left to question my place, if any, in society.

After travelling to Mars and building a giant, crystalline, clockwork palace of thought, I set upon contemplating whether or not humanity deserved my help; would they not simply work towards destroying themselves in increasingly ingenious new ways? Had I not been reminded by my foxy protege of  various great works of human artistic aspiration, I may have simply left this galaxy altogether.

The others, battling Eric Van Lustbader in the stacks and some horrid deformity of Dewey’s in the Hindi magazine section, too would lose faith unless…unless that which gave them to know in their hearts that humanity was still worth fighting for, was re-affirmed. That thing most upheld and uplifting, the beating heart of humanity’s purest hopes: beauty, love, truth, wonder — and art.

Art, above all others. The purest pursuit.

This, surely, must be the reason why the library had decided to widen the MAP program to all regular patrons. A blast of culture and learning to sweep over our fair city and its citizens, heroes, and villains alike. A vertiable explosion of truth and purity to expel the sicknesses of corruption and crime from our streets.

And by virtue of a clumsy four-paragraph segue, I am now free to mention completely out of context that the library carries comics and graphic novels as well. You know that MAUS one? Yeah, even that one; assuming whoever’s had it out for six months returns it.

If you’re cheap and sans BitTorrent, DVDs and CDs are available too, but the selection should not be described as dazzling. Keep hopes and expectations at low to low-medium for best results.  Besides, library loaners are a poor substitute for stuff you would otherwise have to pay for. Only trick is, ticket numbers are limited weekly.

Get yours tomorrow (or later)!

* The ability to carry on a conversation without actually saying anything about anything or, to put it another way, avoiding commitment to any possible viewpoint whatsoever (i.e. “Certainly a lot of weather we’re experiencing today” or “What a season the team’s having, huh?”)