…and we’re back. Wow! What an amazing B Side that was yesterday, huh?

Site traffic spiked to well over 5000% and the comments were still going until the wee hours this morning! Thank you all so much for participating in what was obviously a hotly contested issue. I  think that the obvious winning comment was made by anonymousse_205 who, with amazing clarity and insight, disproved once and for all the existence of God.

Too bad the stress of high traffic on the site forced me to remove the post; maybe I’ll revive it again at some future time.

Instead of trying to top that doozie, I’d just like to dedicate a few brief lyrics to Chris Bosh; the same ones in which I take consolation during my troubled times:

Billie Jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl who says that I am the one
But the kid is not my son
Sh’mon

I used to be an angry young man. Now I’m a slightly less angry mid-thirties man.

In the past I would’ve treated a brutal assault on my personal space as an affront to all I held near and dear. These days, an inattentively rude bump by a passing stranger will start me reflecting on how such callous mental vacancy can be made funny. For me.

In my maturity I prefer my satisfaction a little softer, a bit milder, slightly more painfully embarrassing.

I was thinking that an investment in half a dozen banana cream pies and a small card table would do. These would be transported to an ample sidewalk  somewhere in the city. A camera operator somewhere on the opposite side would help to make the golden moments last.

I would then hold one pie aloft, flush with oncoming faces and clearly visible to all but the most inattentive of walking puff pastries. (There’s still a need to work out how to best keep the pie intact here, but I have faith in the innovative power of sweet retribution.)

Then I would simply wait, unmoving, timing how long it takes before somebody plants their puss square in the middle of startling, delicious sobriety. Society benefits, I laugh my ass off, and everyone gets a tasty, instructive treat. Just think of the potential!

Just kidding. Yup, apparently that’s a bonafide legal defence these days.

In case your cave doesn’t get cable yet, the story is one of your basic teenage withholding-sex-for-murder deals. Right now the jury’s still out on whether or not the female half of the duo is culpable, but the precendent that appears to have been set has already been decided.

After all, if you can say “I didn’t really mean it” when on trial for first-degree murder (meaning it was planned), you should certainly be able to use it in almost any other criminal and civil defence.  Consider this courtroom evidence, a few excerpts from instant messages between the two:

“I want her dead … if it takes more than a week, then we’re just gonna be friends”
“ur getting blocked until u kill her”

The mother of the accused girl suggests that “they were trying to make each other jealous”. Her lawyer says that “things don’t necessarily mean what they appear to mean”*. Presumably Judge Nordheimer weighs each defence before allowing anything under the sun into his courtroom, so in this instance it must have been deemed a-okay.

I’m not suggesting that the defence will fly with the jury. Arguing that the words “dead” and “kill” in instant messages (where brevity usually prevails) mean to disassociate or block, especially when the longer word  “blocked” is used to mean just this, is a huge stretch. Even punctuation seems to be well thought out, and the diminutive “ur” and”u”, and a captilized “I” suggest a domninant attitude in the relationship.

Whatever; the point is that whichever angle you approach this from, it’s been allowed to be a part of the defence, including the bit where it wasn’t really serious. I really hope that when the full transcripts are released, these few details will somehow make sense. Right now, I get the impression that I should be able to make death threats of all sorts as long as I laugh about it afterwards.

You!

Stop right where you are. Yes, you. Put that ass crack on the pavement or so help me.

Good.

All settled?

The voice of Bill Carrol came on. You know, the CFRB 1010 morning guy and his cadre of over-drole associates. “Did you see this on CNN?”, I paraphrase. “Now they’re using my idea to try and put a positive spin on the news. Using ‘Road to Rescue‘. I’ve been doing that for months! That was my idea!” … Continue Reading

To use a bovine analogy, there are few things that allow me to stomach the sheer, brutal cud of incompetence that seems so prevalent these days.

A few days ago, for example, I was calling the credit company to declare that I was making my last payment on the card (and the horse it rode in on), and to ask if I “should expect a final interest charge between the time the payment is made and the time it’s actually processed.”

Doesn’t that seem like a common question? Of all the possible, even improbable answers I was expecting,  “how should we know what activities take place on your account?”, was just about the only one that didn’t cross my mind.  It’s hard to know how to reply to such insult-bordering statements without resorting to violence, but I managed to take in a breath and yield to a cool, curt, “because it’s your card”, while silently mouthing the word “jackass”.

Such tension releasers, however, often don’t come in the moment and are usually insufficient to make you feel better. Abusing your pets/family just isn’t practical these days, and sweet sweet vengeance usually ends up being a George Costanza-type affair that leaves you even more bitter. That dead horse has been beaten enough. Instead, solace must be taken where and when it can.

I take mine in the form of anonymous social commentary, usually spray-painted on walls or sidewalks. No, these are not the usual tags; those are just evidence of perennial self-indulgence. No one cares that you were here, “SnuR<hb 2K9 dash-swirl”! — if that is your real name.

I like the stuff that shows some thought other than “oh shit I’m so wasted, dude!” Stencils are great for this sort of thing. They’re physical evidence that someone planned the affair — going to the trouble of finding the appropriate image(s), contrasting the living bejeezus out of them, cutting them out, etc.  Their Holstein pattern, for me, always alludes to greener pastures where bullshit is actually nourishing, and the knowledge that someone out there really just wants to give me a chuckle. Here’s a taste.

I ran into the coffee shop for my breakfast of last resort, the over-soda’d muffin.

The shop owner (Japanese, I think) registered my order, a “BAH-nana MUPPIN!”, with the cashier. She was young, maybe fourteen, and visibly burdened with an awkwardness that was probably compounded by her own mangled English.

There was something unsettling about her presence in the coffee shop during school hours. That was, until I realized that this is the first week of March break. Then came the super (and much worse), realization that this girl would probably be spending her March break working in her dad’s coffee shop.

To all of you flying south for alcohol-fueled hijinks, allow me to express my disdain. Mostly because I never got to go.

To all of you valiant teenage soldiers holding down the home front this year, and anyone else who doesn’t get a break when, let’s face it, we should all be relaxing, let me raise a muppin top in salute. You do me proud. And breakfast.

index fingers out-apart-down-together-snap-sville. Dig?

I feel like I’ve discovered a bewitching new world right where my TV monitor used to be. In the same sense as car crashes or deformed kittens are so damn compelling, local access cable offers a dizzying variety of shows that make looking away impossible.

I just want to point out, right up front, that this is neither moaning, bitching, nor complaining. I watch enough dreck that tries to pass itself off as entertainment that, production values aside, local cable is a comparative gleaming jewel.

I mean, there’s absolutely no pretense here.  These folks know that their audience is extremely limited so their shows have a real laissez-faire atmosphere. During weekdays, some of these shows must skim dangerously low over the ratings plains. The effort matches the budget, matches the content, [unfairly] matches audience numbers.

Yet, despite these seeming obstacles, we find encapsulated in each frozen frame a vast, endless realm of entertainment. Kind of like a heavy acid trip.

… Continue Reading

I was suckled by Bruce Sterling, weaned by William Gibson, and can recite the dialogue in Blade Runner from memory.

So it came as no surprise when, flipping through the latest edition of Eye Weekly while stuffing my face with a Liberty Village jerk chicken sandwich, I was drawn to Shawn Micaleff’s article on development in Toronto and the tensions it raises between pro/anti-urban development advocates.

Like an earlier article I had written, Shawn points out that construction around the metropolis is rampant (the second largest in North America), and that many of the new highrises are indelibly changing the historic face of the city.  He also makes an aborted attempt to connect what’s happening today to a hackneyed version of the future as it was seen from the nineteen-eighties. Aside from a few weak parallels between the cyberpunk genre, Shawn mostly misses the point.

… Continue Reading

My best laid plans had all the chances of snow in hell.

I had been depending on the bitter cold to stay in place; I needed liquids to be able to flash-freeze on contact with surfaces. Unfortunately, a major thaw settled over the city and I ended up with nothing more than slush and puddles, and my originally planned topic ran down the storm drain along with everything else.

I was moping along until, my eye being drawn by a reflected glint of sunlight, I spotted something just as worthy of an in-depth article: a filthy snowbank, slowly disintegrating in the gentle afternoon sun, dislodging it’s treasures onto the sidewalk.

It occurred to me that the layers of the grimy snow (and more importantly their contents) were, in a sense, a sort of stratified time capsule much like the earth embankments of traditional archeological digs. Each line represented a period in which it snowed sufficiently to engulf any lost or discarded articles.

We could (more or less) correlate these layers’ contents to actual calendar days and trace the history of the pile.  A whole two months’ worth of history just lay there in the dirty ice waiting to be uncovered! … Continue Reading

I’m veering away from my regular existential indulgences for a bit to wax oracular about a highly visible trend around the sprawl: the influx of permanent influences that will change, and are changing, the face of city.

None of this will even begin to approach news for most Torontonians.

The slow and stealthy creep of Metro stores over the past few years as the company gobbled up A&P/Dominion, Loeb, and other grocery stores, was clearly visible even as it came as a bit of a surprise to locals (that was my impression anyway). The re-branding was simply a facelift on a done deal, but it threw light on a trend which is continued by extra-Torontonian projects such as the Ritz-Carlton Group’s Ritz Residences, the Maned One’s Trump Tower, and even the sweet and matronly franchise of Chez Cora’s.

… Continue Reading