Category: life

Books and songs and Bollywood movies can be made about my quest to learn how to drive. I’ve driven good cars (a ’99 Lexus ES 300) and bad cars (’97 Pontiac Sunfire). I’ve gotten a license in 1997, became indisposed for two years, finally took a road test, and then had my license expire, forcing me to do the whole graduated licensing thing all over again. On a lark, I ducked into a DriveTest centre on New Year’s Eve 2002, and got another “G1” learner’s permit. But it took my pilgrimage back to TO to get a hold of a car and actually practice for the roadtest.

So I’m sitting in my Dad’s Buick, nervous as heck, waiting for the driver examiner for my G1 Exit exam. It’s stuffy and humid inside the car. I’m at Victoria Terrace, a slightly dilapidated plaza and home of the Metro-East DriveTest centre. During the day, it’s a virtual death trap for pedestrians and parked cars, with barely competent drivers weaving in and out of the lot and making cringe-worthy attempts at parking. I’ve noticed that cars in the surrounding neighbourhood have been parked with their rears close to driveways: the better to keep novice drivers from trying to parallel park with your car and hitting it.

We’ve been told to drive into the back, park forward against a fence, sign in with the dispatch and wait our turns. I take a look around at my fellow drivers. Many have inexplicably brought their entire families to the driver’s examination centre.

In my first test drive in Toronto, my entire family sat in the car with me. Never again. My sister would squeal every time I passed a parked car, claiming I was “too close”, while my mom would scream “You just failed! You are a failure!” at every mistake, real or imaginary, I made. It was there that I noticed that a backseat driver’s level of opinion is inversely proportional to actual driving experience; my mom couldn’t do a parallel park with a shopping cart.

When I booked June 21st as the date of my test, my mom asked, “So soon?” To be honest, I wanted it done and over.

My dad, bless him, is a better mentor, and we practiced for several months. The only problem is, he got obsessive as the exam date crept closer. I ended up driving through downtown during rush hour, and performing incessant back-in parkings for hours at a time. He devised stranger and stranger tests of skill. I once had to parallel park with an eighteen wheeler.

So back to the present. The examiner arrives, plops down in the leather passenger seat, and immediately goes for the automatic seat controls. I hope I get brownie points for not arriving in a rusting Toyota subcompact like everybody else did.

The road test started out as a test of my intestinal fortitude. I braved a minivan making a left turn on a red light, two yahoos cutting me off in opposite directions as I cross the intersection, and a garbage truck stopped dead not nine feet from the light. We continued on southbound, made a left into the residential area, navigated the tree-lined streets, performed a curb park and a three point turn, and then came back to Victoria Terrace.

He chewed me out on not heeding right of way to a car approaching from 100 yards away, and then chewed me out again for being too timid at the next intersection.

Anyway, I passed. Onward to G2.

If you folks down south are feeling blue about your impending November presidential elections, feel free to commiserate with us. Studies have shown that voter participation in Canada has dwindled – and even a baboon can explain that it’s because all the candidates suck. “The trick is to pick the one who lies the least,” an octegenarian winked at us as we stood at the polling line.

Fortunately, the Canadian campaign period is only a month and a half – a sharp contrast to the year-long election jamboree in the US. I guess we just want to get it over with. Ballots list the names of our local candidates – not the leaders of their respective parties – in a bid to make voters choose the best local representative for the job. Yes, this does occasionally lead to awkward situations where a party may win the majority vote, but their leader loses in his/her own riding (In this case, someone who got voted in steps down, and they switch places).

Here are the dramatis personae:

Liberal Party
The “Grits” are currently the ones in the driver’s seat, having enjoyed two back-to-back majority governments for the past eleven years under Jean Chretien. However, they currently have egg on their face due to the recent “AdScam”, a sponsorship scandal that they are suspected of orchestrating.

Throw in a few unpopular decisions they’ve made throughout their tenure, add a general feeling that it’s time for some new blood, and you can see it’s an uphill battle for them. The recently elected Liberal provincial government in Ontario has also added healthcare premiums (a broken election promise), which hasn’t helped things.

Despite their name, they are only moderately left-wing. Well, by Canadian standards anyway.

Conservative Party of Canada (CPC)
The CPC was initially three parties: the Reform Party, Canadian Alliance, and the Progressive Conservatives. The Progressives, a moderately rightwing party, were the favourites in the late 1980’s, where they enjoyed two consecutive terms under Brian Mulroney. Mulroney is famous for creating the an 8% sales tax (the GST), and ratifying the NAFTA free trade agreement. Anyway, the PC Party or “Tories” was clobbered by the Liberals in the election afterwards. They only won two seats in the House of Commons.

Reform and Alliance were both extreme right parties, most famous for making statements that could be construed as racist or sexist.

Desperate times call for desperate measures I suppose, hence this Frankenstein of a political party. They seem to have trouble consolidating their position on several key issues, but their U.S. Republican-esque mandates to increase military spending, privatizing healthcare and tax cuts has disturbed more than a few voters.

New Democrat Party (NDP)
Many a book has been written about the Canadian quirk that is the NDP. Always trying to grapple for attention, and yet always in third place. Their platform is more left-wing than the Liberals, but strangely enough their target audience, unions, want no part with them. Their current leader is most famous for making outlandish accusations (i.e. that the Liberal leader is personally responsible for the murder of the homeless), which frankly just hurts their credibility. Some have also labelled their economic strategies as sheer lunacy.

Bloc Quebecois (BQ)
The Bloc was born in 1993 with one goal in mind: to annex Quebec from the rest of Canada. This position appeals to the francophone’s patriotic heart, but unfortunately it doesn’t appeal to the patriotic brain: For one thing, sovereignty would be financial and economic suicide, and they’ve never given a good answer as to how they’ll pull it off at all. A key moment in Bloc history is when their chief supporter, a former Quebec premier, appeared drunk as a sailor after the narrow 1995 referendum defeat.

Today’s Bloc is more moderate: a semi-conservative platform, but Quebec gets top priority. Not exactly a crowd pleaser with the other provinces, but their platform is actually milder than the CPC’s in comparison.

Then there are the one-trick pony parties: the Green Party, the Marijiuana Party, the Marxist-Leninists, and the Canadian Communist Party (yes, they’re different, and they hate it when they get confused). You can probably guess what their respective mandates are, and write then down in one sentence each to boot. Sadly, the Rhino Party and Natural Law Party (aka the yogic flyers – no, I am not joking) are missing this time around.

But yes, I did vote.

I focused on the local candidates in my riding of Parkdale-High Park. It’s the weirdest riding I’ve ever seen – one half is a well-to-do residential ‘burb, the other a poorer, urbanized ‘hood. Naturally all the candidates are in the rich part. Anyhoo, the Liberal candidate was no good, since she supported an anti-user Internet copyright law I disagreed with. I ended up picking the local candidate I felt was least likely to stab me in the back.

You can find more info on Canadian political parties at Freedictionary.

So I was sleeping and I had this strange dream last night. I had signed on to play a forensic investigator on the TV show, CSI. I also remember thinking this would look good on my resume. I had to explain to this little girl that I had to take away all her stuffed toys because they were evidence and that they may have “little tiny things you can’t see” that I could use to catch the bad guy. She kind of lost interest when I started talking about microscopes. One of the other investigators suggested I just spray Luminol on them.

Then I was on a snowy mountain, and I had to shimmy down a foxlift back to the main headquarters somewhere, where this Joe Pesci lookalike and two other men received me. The journey was exhausting, so I had to be wrapped in quilts and rehabilitated. However, I suspected that this was a trap and they would betray me (I mean, has Joe Pesci ever play an honest character?). Lo and behold, they were actually wheeling me to a trash compactor.

Fortunately, I was lucidly dreaming, so I jumped out and kicked two of them in the face, knocking them out. The third man, who looked like Jesse from “Full House” but Asian, was a more worthy adversary. I had to use all my martial arts skill to defeat him. I finished him off by grabbing his left wrist and spinning him upside down, and kicking him in the neck. This fight sequence was all in slow motion, like we were underwater, which is a typical dream sensation.

Later in the dream I was driving around the terrain in a MicroMachine SUV.

On an unrelated note, I had a big bowl of Rolo ice cream about an hour before I went to bed.

On May 25th, my good friend Dezza IMed me about making a new website design to go with his new domain, MaskofChina.com. I remarked that there’s nothing wrong with what he has now; after all, he made it himself, it’s homebrew. To which he replied, “Nah, I need a cool one…now that I got my own site…My site isn’t coffee!”

As Dezza likes to say, it’s a Chinese Situation. Behold, before and after:

Fortunately, my CSS has improved to the point that I could sketch the design, code it, inlay the Blogger template codes into it and launch it on midnight June 14th. I followed the tried and true avante garde blogging template: two floating columns centred on the page. The only irritating thing is another of IE’s quirks: if an item on the left column exceeds the set width of said column, the right-hand menu will cease to wrap.

I also designed a favicon for his site (to see it in IE, bookmark the site and click that bookmark). The Chinese character for Friend. Hope you enjoy it, buddy.

Rather busy these days – I’ve signed up for a night course at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto entitled “MBA Essentials for Managers”. So far, it’s been an enriching course, although it is only a sampler for the UofT Executive MBA program, available for a sum that could otherwise get you a fully-loaded BMW M5.

During the weekends, I borrow my dad’s car (which sadly is not an M5) to practice driving for my driving exam coming up next week. It’s strange; I’m usually not phased by impending events or deadlines until they are just about to break, but I’m already getting butterflies everytime I think about it.

I’ve also been working on a new website design for Dezza (you know, my friend who’s teaching English to the hapless Chinese of the city of Dalian, China). Top off my nights playing badminton (and fortunately improving), and trying to scream through Neal Stephenson’s 1,000 page novel called Quicksilver before the library loan gives its ghost, and I haven’t had much spare time on my hands.

Sunday was a perfect day for stomping around Toronto and peering into interesting buildings normally blocked from public eyes. And peering and appreciating Toronto’s architecture is what the Doors Open event is all about. It only runs for one weekend in May every year, and with over 150 buildings to choose from – everything from churches to City Hall – you basically have to pick your favourites, and hope for the best. We got to see three buildings:

The CBC Broadcasting Centre. They have a neat children’s museum on the ground floor, with video clips and memorabilia from Mr. Dressup, The Friendly Giant and other excellent CBC children’s shows from the ’80’s. Upstairs on the 7th floor is the carpentry department. Up there they have sets for Coach’s Corner (with a cardboard cutout of Don Cherry!) and Athens 2004, plus other great stage props, such as the Royal Canadian Air Farce’s Chicken Cannon sign.

The clock on the right just cracks me up. It’s a Gorg clock from Fraggle Rock, designed by Tim McElecheran. The clockdial is inscribed with imaginary numerals, and since the Gorgs are Muppets with four fingers, McElecheran used an octal numbering system. My geeky heart flutters just thinking about it.

The BMW Toronto dealership. Silverlotus remarked that this was a sleazy way to get people to spend an afternoon ogling cars, and she’s probably right. Still, the building has some architectural merit: all the walls are made of glass, including the elevator, and they use a moat around the dealership to cool the building. Perched on a hill overlooking the Gardiner Expressway, it has a commanding view of the downtown core. It’s also the largest facility of its kind in Canada.

Union Station. If there was ever an award for Most Neglected Historical Landmark, Union might get it. Once the hub of activity during the heydays of locomotives, Union is now a pitstop for subway and GO Train commuters, and it’s in need for $150 million in repairs. The washrooms have the same fixtures they enjoyed when they were brand new in the 1930s.

What hasn’t aged a bit, however, is the Great Hall. It’s flanked by two giant windows on either side to let light in, and the bricks are made of a special Minnesota limestone that further reflects this light. The giant windows are actually translucent glass hallways that employees can walk through, which you can see in the picture to the right. Despite all that ingenuity, there was one gaff – the carving of the name of the city of Sault Ste. Marie is mispelled.

Tomorrow will be our big Doors Open excursion, but today, we decided to poke around the neighbourhood, check out some garage sales.

Saw a Macintosh Classic for $3. Not sure if it worked. I really, really wanted it. Other interesting things on sale:

• The Book of Mormon
• Holiday Inn complimentary soaps and shampoos
• “Spice World“, on VHS
• A rather nice Chinese wood carving display
• an Ewoks lunchbag featuring Wicket and Princess Kneesa

We then tottered off to High Park to see Colbourne Lodge, and see the wildlife at High Park. Despite the many warnings and signs forbidding the feeding of the animals, they seem quite portly all the same.

The Cheese Boutique, our local gourmet food store, gives out these pale yellow notepads, and I noticed the other day the words “De gustibus……” printed at the bottom of each page. Ever curious, I went on the net and found this delightful article on sage Latin quotes from this Looksmart Food Management article.

FM’s readers will be especially interested in phrases that allude to food or appetite. Fames optimum condimentum, for example (hunger is the best seasoning). Or Fabas indulcet fames (hunger makes everything taste good; literally, hunger sweetens beans).

When one tinkers with a recipe, it is Ad gustum (to one’s taste,” as in adding salt). It is usually best to leave such matters to an arbiter elegantiae (an authority in matters of taste).

BTW, the quote in full, “De gustibus non est disputandum” means, “In matters of taste, there are no judges”. I’ll drink to that.

Starting about two months ago, I started going to badminton sessions at my local community centre. I figured it was a good way to hang out with Juice, get a little cardio, and basically stay out of trouble four hours a week.

I confess, I never played badminton until two months ago. I played tennis only briefly in university, and own a tennis racquet that’s never been used in five years. I have lousy depth perception to boot.

However, I’ve trudged along, and Juice has encouragingly told me I’ve already improved immensely.

So it came to my surprise to be insulted twice for my beginner’s skill last night.

One of the “regulars” confided with me that I was a poor player, and I was cramping everyone’s game. “They are just too nice to tell you,” he said. He continued on this point, and concluded by saying I should practice at home before coming.

I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to practice badminton by myself in my apartment. Unfortunately, he was not as helpful in providing tips on this regard as he was on commenting on my apparently pathetic skills.

It was if he told me not come back to the public swimming lanes until I did enough few breast strokes in my bathtub to keep up with the other participants.

The second fella, my playing partner, was even more blunt. Right before a serve, he noticed I was wearing a Goodlife Fitness t-shirt, and remarked, “You should go to Goodlife more often.”

This was from a guy who wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe himself, although he wouldn’t look out of place at a hotdog eating pageant. I seriously wanted to point this out to him in an equally derogatory way, but just playfully wagged my finger at him and continued playing.

Later that night, I noticed that I’ve never seen a single person compliment another person on the courts. With attitudes like these, it’s no surprise that many novices decide to quit. I won’t, but I’m not terribly impressed right now.

I apologize to everyone. I thought I was in a community centre, not the World Badminton Championships.

More on the Doyle vs. O’Reilly thing. The National Post somewhat sensationalizes the situation, claiming the feud is “escalating”:

[O’Reilly] also urged his supporters to initiate a writing campaign at Doyle’s expense. Many obeyed, apparently, flooding Doyle’s e-mail box with hundreds of hateful retorts, many of them with expletives to be deleted. Even the New York Times paid attention with an article this week that reprinted many of the postings.

“You’re lucky we don’t attack Canada next. We hate communists here,” wrote John from Virginia.

But the hate mail was also followed by a flood of missives from sympathetic Americans, according to Doyle.

“I think most of these people live in parts of the country that CSI couldn’t use for their storylines because all the DNA is the same and there are no dental records,” wrote Jami from Omaha.

A fellow Globe columnist also reminisced about her public appearance on Fox, opposite Bill O’Reilly in a well-written column:

It’s not enough to show compassion to people you love, the [Dalai Lama] told Canadians this week. You also have to show it to people who hate you. This was lingering in my mind as Nate Fredman, the nice assistant to Mr. O’Reilly, the man who once said to the son of a Twin Towers victim, “Get out of my studio before I tear you to fucking pieces,” urged me to appear.

Ultimately however, she found the meetup rather frustrating.

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response — not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam.

The best quip I’ve heard this week about Fox News is that it’s the newsroom equivalent of the WWE.