Okay, so now it’s going to look like I’m obsessed with movie stars or something. But that’s not it at all. I just happen to pass the TIFF bigwig red carpet every day, and the bigwigs just happen to be there. In essence, they’re making themselves available for me. I’ll drop in for half an hour but, I mean, I’ve got other things to do. If they can move it along and show some appreciation for my sacrifice, I’ll humour them. I’m not a jerk.

They’re usually pretty courteous and … oh look! It’s Keanu Reeves!

Thanks, Keanu. You’re looking … well.

But Rebecca Miller, she’s too transfixed by someone’s scruffy locks to say hi to me:

… Continue Reading

Tuesday, September 8th. The day when all of Toronto crawls painfully out of bed to get the crusty kids to school, crusty husband/wife to their jobs, and crusty selves to their own. The only people that didn’t seem crusty on Tuesday were the folks at Citytv. That’s because they’d just moved into their new building:

The Citytv crew made a big to-do about how the station would now be in the actual heart of the city. They’re probably right, but I suspect they just wanted to be closer to my place. Either way, it was a wise decision.

The move has been in the works for about two years. Gord Martineau, Citytv’s sneering six o’clock news anchor, has pitilessly plugged his involvement in the move stating that he was the one who brought up the idea with boss Ted Rogers, the guy who owns every co-ax cable in Toronto (and then some).

The building itself was an Olympics-themed tourist attraction for a couple of years, hence the big cone-torch thingie at the top. Aside from the pleasantly phallic symbolism (granted, a horribly deformed phallus), the building also forms an interesting arch over the intersection of Victoria and Dundas. Streetcar tracks go through the arch but there are no open power lines, probably because the construction workers were afraid of electrocution. Babies. Anyway, I’m certain that once they open it up it’ll make for a great place to throw back a couple of swigs of paper-bagged hooch, away from scornful eyes.

But Gord’s masturbatory visions weren’t the only things making headlines on Tuesday. U. of T. and York U. put their first-year students through the wash for the first day of frosh week:

All the noobs were baptized in the waters of City Hall with a ritual involving a Kindergarten-style initiation. A girl on a megaphone shouted out some rhyming instructions with all the students acting out the directions while repeating what she said. The Universities were only mentioned a couple of times during the chanting; they spent more time pretending to be alligators, crabs, and sleeping monkeys. Hurray for our future workforce!

What a time to lose my internet connection! And with TIFF coming up ‘n all:

Couldn’t have come at a worse time. Despite George Clooney and I being best buds, I doubt he’ll postpone his arrival for my technical difficulties.  I bet he’s disappointed.

Sorry, George. You’ll have to takeit up with my ISP. I tried and I guess I’m just not famous enough.

So, let’s have a look at what we have here, shall we?

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First of all, ignore the percentages shown above. The -41% thing would suggest that, perhaps, they’re not entirely accurate.

So, out of 42 votes cast the highest percentage (21%), believed that Mondays should be illegal. A further 14% cast a disparaging glance at the rest of the week too — something about shooting the weekdays while we’re at it? Crazy gun-nutty Americans :) Most shocking, however, are the serious allegations of impropriety on the part of Mondays, with a whopping 17% of you (that’s nearly 1 in 5), reporting that Mondays have made unwanted sexual advances toward you. Only one vote was cast for the whole poll not making any sense, and I cast that one, so we can safely assume everyone understood the question. Except me.

But who cares? Isn’t that shocking?! I sure do hope the local media pick up this story.

My own experience with Monday is one of pain. I woke up today in some discomfort, having finally attended Dream in the Park.

The discomfort portion of the story, I’m ashamed to report, is one-hundred percent me.

They do recommend bringing a blanket, jacket, and bug repellant. I did not. To complicate matters further, I had biked to High Park, pushing it up that final bitch of a road like a real man:

Then walking the remaining half of the hill like a real tired man.

By the time I got to the top I had worked up a good, healthy sweat. As I may have mentioned before, the seating for Dream is literally on the ground. The stage is simply a wooden platform and the audience sits in an amphitheatre cut out of the hillside in front of it. Luckily, I did have something between me and the moist earth, but I hadn’t planned on the chill wind that swept down into the valley that night. If the play hadn’t been so engrossing, I would’ve picked up and left. But those assholes were so damn good that I ended up with a sore back!

Okay, so it’s Shakespeare. Yeah, it put me to sleep in high school too. English; borringest subject ever. The Tempest; *sticking finger down throat*. But people actually brought their kids to this!

I don’t want to sound like someone’s paying me to say this because, alas, I remain sponsorless, but this is really a show to see. With the Pay-What-You-Can pricing, it’s always affordable. You’re encouraged to bring snacks and anything you want to make yourself comfortable. And I can assure you that whatever your equivalent of the suggested $20  donation is, the feature-length show will be well worth it.

The beauty of this production is that it’s been taken back to its roots. No, not rag-adorned, unwashed, Elizabethan showmen; I’m talking about the people for whom Shakespeare wrote his works for. Unfortunately, the language isn’t quite as up-to-date as it once may have been, but the actors make up for this through their modern intonation, great acting, and physical improvisation. They really bring out the comedic, entertaining nature of the play. And even though they’re all speaking at a fair clip, the whole story is completely intelligible. It’s almost like you’re a filth-covered Shakespearean commoner out for a night on the mud.

I had never actually read The Tempest. I knew the gist of it; banished wizard-Duke Prospero, big storm, deserted island, yadda yadda; but never the nitty gritty. I’m fairly certain that the glaring Gilligan’s Island overtones present throughout the Dream version are not part of the original story, but it did help to set the context.

Prospero was replaced with Prospera (Karen Robinson), and Ariel (Audrey Dwyer) did a couple of Lion-King-inspired musical sequences, presumably to give the show a softer touch. Nothing over the top, mind you; old Willy’s work is still kept pretty much intact. Just enough to break up the slow parts. Worked for me.

The music and sound effects worked with the trees, bees, and birds around them rather than trying to fight it out. The crickets started to sound like cicadas after a while. You kind of got the feeling you were actually on Prospera’s island:

Yeah, I really liked it. A modernized classic that was genuinely entertaining. Can’t say any of that about any movie I’ve paid to see lately.

Okay, time for me to get back to the heating pad. Mondays …

Here’s how I think it goes down:

1. “Hello? … How can I help you, Larry? … Oh my God! Is carbon monoxide dangerous?! OH MY GOD!! WHAT DO I DO?”
2. “Right, so I’ll get the gas out by breaking a nearby window? With the heaviest object I can find? OKAY!”
3. *grunt of exertion* “C’mon, Ollie. You’re saving my life, buddy. Don’t be so selfish.”
4. “LARRY?! OH MY GOD, LARRY!! HE’S GOT MY EYEBALL!! LARRY?! WHAT DO I DO, LARRY?!”

Now that I’ve set the context, imagine this actually happening, minus the cat, but plus the breaking of the window.

Or someone calls you at the fast food joint you’re working at, tells you that you need to activate the chemical sprinkler system immediately, and then strip down and wait outside because the chemicals spraying you are highly toxic.

I know, right? My first inclination would be to do exactly as they say.

Seriously, if Tariq Malik is the guy behind PrankNET, he’s someone I’m going to be watching very closely. He (from Windsor), his Toronto accomplice, and few other members have been prank calling people in the US and getting them to perform what I’ve describe above. And more. Many of the pranks result in damages, some of them quite severe.

I hadn’t actually heard of PrankNET until The Smoking Gun ran an expose that was picked up by local news. As soon as I read the story, I had to have a listen for myself!

I must say, the pranksters did sound awfully convincing, sometimes teaming up to sound even more official. But there was always a point where, if I were in the same situation, I’d have to say, “Woaw now. Hold on just a second.” Being told to break a labeled safety seal on a hotel sprinkler system would be one. Another would be trying to bash a hole in my hotel window as per telephone instruction, after sealing the door against the poisonous gas in the hallway, then having someone in the hallway tell me to stop hitting the window (or maybe they were standing outside the hotel and I opened the window to talk to them), then coming back and repeating all this three or four more times.

Sometimes people complied and successfully destroyed property on the first try. Sometimes they really had to work for it.

Just a word of advice from personal experience; if you’re ever in a similar situation you may be tempted to just wreck the whole place, but hold on! You have an alternative: “What? You want me to break out the window with a chair? Sure, let me just call you right back. *click* *dial* Hello, front desk? Did you just ask me to break out my window with a chair? No? Can you call the police please? Thanks ever so much.”

It’s obvious Tariq and William Marquis (the Torontonian), are at least guilty of impersonation (of police/fire officials), but it makes me wonder if they’ll be held responsible for all the damage that people did simply because some stranger on the end of a phone told them to. How far does personal responsibility extend? What is the measure of “better” in “they should’ve known better”?

(Don’t worry, Ollie’s just fine. My eyeball will heal too.)

I’ve been thinking about producing a more immersive rendition of /sectionb. I’ve also been thinking that producing a “Parapsychological Spy Thriller” via conventional means is not be the correct approach. It needs to be a little more artsy, interpretive, associative. Unfortunately, illustration and animation aren’t really my thing.

Although I can draw some basic proportions and I try to pay attention to composition and colour, I can’t produce the type of visual output that modern artificial intelligence can. But as it happens I also dabble in code so it wasn’t long before I was fucking around with Stable Diffusion and similar software. Unfortunately, if I wanted to use the AI to produce short films the still images it spat out would need to be animated using something like morphing — doable but laborious.

By one propitious circumstance a fairly recent upgrade to Stable Diffusion by Deforum popped up in my search results one day and as soon as I saw a few samples I got giddy. Not only is the animated output of DSD dream-like and trippy, which is very apropos for /sectionb, it also improvises around the periphery of supplied prompts/themes in surprising ways, which is also quite apropos.

Initially I tried adding voice narration but it just didn’t fit so instead I converted the text to subtitles/closed captions, chucked in some original music, and after that the video basically just produced itself.

A month and a half between posts might seem excessive but hear me out! I could’ve just posted another static map image but I’m trying to push the envelope a little bit so I thought, “Why not a video?”

Unfortunately, adding a time component introduces a whole bunch of new complications. First I had to alter my code to produce output based on a temporal sequence rather than a single point in time. After that I had to figure out how to produce composite images so that I could add things like the time/date stamp. Then I had to figure out how to actually encode the video. Following that, the clunky user interface needed to be updated in order to accommodate the new features. Then I realized that the data didn’t include any duration information so I had to figure out how to extrapolate it. And then I had to run the extrapolation routine over the whole database which took weeks, no doubt owing to my weak SQL.

Anyways, I find the first product to be kinda soothing and hypnotic and leaves me thinking about what else I could do with it. So without further adieu here’s 24 hours of all C4S calls over Halloween, each call (red dot) growing larger in diameter the longer it remains active:

There’s a western stretch of the delicate, crumbly Gardiner Expressway called The Bentway. To be more accurate, The Bentway is below the Gardiner and it’s about as aesthetically pleasing as can reasonably be expected.

Every year at this time there’s an event called the Bentway Block Party and since we’d never been, me and Sarah decided to mosey on down to check it out.

I imagined the entire length of the walk being occupied by barbecues, boom boxes, and beverages. Instead, everything was crammed into a small area just off Strachan Avenue.

There was a small stage and square performance area which, when we arrived, was being used for some sort of lame strut exhibition involving what seemed like randos from the crowd. I still don’t quite understand the MC’s directions to, “OWN THE CATWALK! BE THE CATWALK! EAT THE CATWALK! STOMP THE CATWALK!”

It was just a little too fierce for me, I guess.

I honestly don’t know what was happening there but it came across as some sort of weird debutante diva show. No one seemed happy to be walking around. Some may not have been conscious.

But the “entertainment” aside, when combined with the apparent lack of food, dearth of drink options, and an overall lack of expected block party accoutrements, the whole thing was monotonous and thoroughly underwhelming. I’m genuinely surprised that it attracted as many people as it did.

Possibly the most interesting part of the Bentway Block Party was that they had a RSVP link on their website that invited you to add all sorts of information in order to confirm your “free ticket”. I’m not sure how the collected information was used because there wasn’t even a hint of anyone checking “tickets”.

Would we go again next year? There’d have to be a pretty compelling reason, that’s all I can say.

terrorism (noun):

• The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals.
• Resort to terrorizing methods as a means of coercion, or the state of fear and submission produced by the prevalence of such methods
• The act of terrorizing, or state of being terrorized; a mode of government by terror or intimidation.

Wait…terrorism? Is that accurate?

Yes and Yes!

See previous posts for past examples of media terrorism. Here’s a more current example of how they continue to push their agenda:

People who are unvaccinated against COVID-19 not only place themselves at greater risk of getting infected by the virus, but also increase the infection risk of those around them who have rolled up their sleeves for a jab, according to new Canadian modelling research.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/04/25/remaining-unvaccinated-increases-risk-to-the-vaccinated-says-u-of-t-covid-study.html

This is, of course, based on the same type of modelling that has guided government’s decisions to “protect” the population from the ravages of Covid-19. Note that with the exception of starting values, not a single real-world statistic appears in these models.

It’s not that modelling is necessarily a bad thing. After all, how do you predict something except to build models? If these models are pretty accurate we can call them approximations. If they’re not that accurate then we can call them guesses. And if they contradict actual real-world data? We could call them mistakes (if there’s a later retraction), mental illness (it’s possible!), or if they’re being constantly pushed to advance a very public and blatant political agenda using fear and intimidation despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, terroristic lies.

Once again, we need only look at the actual numbers to expose the fear-and-lie-based agenda being pushed forward by the Trudeau government and its woke allies like the Toronto Star.

Note that these are rates, not raw numbers (which must undoubtedly be much higher). Also note that these statistic continue to co-mingle people without any Covid vaccination and those who are partially vaccinated up to and including two shots (a goal post that’s been moved at least once since the beginning of this year alone).

At this point the medical community should be researching why a full Covid vaccine regimen seems to make you about twice as likely to be infected than other groups. Maybe they are doing this research, and maybe this is just some strange phenomenon happening in Ontario, but good luck finding any such doubts in any mainstream publication. Instead, birdcage liners like the Toronto Star continue to push the “get vaccinated to protect yourself and others” lie while pushing “models” and other ridiculous fictions in the face of a completely contradictory reality.

How likely are you to die from Covid? How about when compared to the seasonal flu?

While on the topic of reality, and since no one seems to be talking about it except to compare how much more likely one vaccine group might get sick over another, I thought I’d do a little number crunching to see what your chances are of landing in the hospital, the ICU, or even dying from Covid-19 if you’re unvaccinated.

First let’s look at deaths.

Most of the work has been done here already, we just have to divide by 1000 to get a rate per 100 (a.k.a. per cent).

Not fully vaccinated: 0.07 / 1000 = 0.00007%

Fully vaccinated: 0.02 / 1000 = 0.00002%

Vaccinated with booster: 0.06 / 1000 = 0.00006%

For comparison, your estimated chances of dying from the seasonal flu are:

100,000 global deaths / 7,800,000,000 global population = 0.000012821 x 100 = 0.0012%

In other words, if you’re unvaccinated (which doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t received any shots), you’re about 17 times more likely to die from the common flu than you are with Covid-19.

Note the use of the word “with” as opposed to the directly causative “from”, which further helps to erode the lies we’re being fed on a daily basis.

Moreover, these values are based on the most conservative estimates with results floored (rounded down), but you can plug higher estimates in there to see that it doesn’t make a huge different.

Now let’s look at serious hospitalizations.

In this case I’m only using one data point so this value will almost certainly vary but, again, not a whole lot. We also need to extrapolate a little here since the Ontario website no longer tracks the number of unvaccinated individuals (a metric which appears inexplicably to differ from other metrics on the same page).

28 cases / (14,700,000 Ontario population – 12,000,000 fully vaccinated) = 28 / 2,700,000 = 0.00001037 x 100 = 0.001%

In other words, your chances of landing in the ICU with (not necessarily due to) Covid-19 are one-one-thousandth of a percent. You’re still slightly more likely to die directly from the seasonal flu (0.0012%) than ending up in the ICU with Covid (0.001%).

Finally, let’s have a look at how likely you are to end up in the hospital with Covid-19.

Using a slight variation of the previous calculation:

232 cases / (14,700,000 Ontario population – 12,000,000 fully vaccinated) = 232 / 2,700,000 = 0.000085926 x 100 = 0.0085%

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find Ontario-specific data but recent influenza hospitalizations reported by the United States’ CDC show a rate of 0.0098%, suggesting quite strongly that the seasonal flu is at this point more likely to land you in a hospital than Covid.

Between the brazen hypocrisy of defaming truckers while gushing support for Ukrainian Nazis, between Trudeau’s blathering about freedom while fawning over Chinese totalitarianism, between all of the bluster about transparency while simultaneously refusing to answer even the most basic questions about why Canadians’ Charter rights were dismissed with the mere wave of a hand, not to mention the overt and ongoing lawlessness, the rotten criminality and tyranny of a federal government that refuses to even think about lifting its Covid mandates is on full display.

If ever there was a real threat to democracy and to Canadians’ freedoms, the most glaring example by far is the reprehensible terrorist Justin Trudeau and his complicit federal government.

…

His first search is for “The Handler” which pulls up over forty pages of results. None of them seem right. He revises the search by adding a few digits from one of the random-looking lines on the business card. There’s exactly one result.

The sequence of letters and numbers on the website seem to match those on the business card. Beneath them, only the words “GET ME HOT” appear on the otherwise empty page. He waves the mouse cursor over the page looking for hidden links but finds none.

Medic is now deeply intrigued.

As a responsible “citizen journalist” I do my best to research a topic before I post about it. Usually I’ll focus on a subject for a few days, sometimes a week, occasionally longer, but there’s one area of research that I’ve pursued incessantly for years.

It’s all based on a collection of loosely organized documents, images, and recordings; a series of semi-anonymous recollections and first-hand experiences that expose the methodology, technology, and clandestine operations of a very unusual organization.

Given this context it wasn’t surprising that much of the dossier was unclear if not outrightly opaque. Nevertheless, I could at least authenticate the bulk of the information, which can be found in its entirety on the web – if you know how and where to look.

Since I’ve taken some liberties with the source material I thought it best to repeat the same disclaimer that the collection opens with, namely, a warning that not everything contained within is 100% accurate for reasons of security, secrecy, privacy, etc. At the same time, however, a lot of it is.

Mostly it’s a matter of corroboration.

Without any additional preamble the dossier dives straight in…