Category: life

A photo blog of my hometown, Toronto. Looks like it was taken from the Delta Chelsea Inn – or the very least, near Gerrard and Yonge St. The tall building half and inch from the left is the Metropolitan Hotel. The Greyhound station is on the left side of the street somewhere. An excellent picture site. Unfortunately, I only have a S110, so no time lapse trickery for me.

I can take pictures of my hotel room too though. How’s this:

I think my friend Dezza, currently in China, will appreciate this – over there going to Pizza Hut is like strutting into the Rosewater Supper Club. Over here, you can even order it for room service for less than $10.

In 1998, a local high-school boy called Kenneth Au-Yeung was in the local paper. He was a choirboy, Grade A student, and the son of an upper-class family.

He was an avid volunteer and helped publish his school’s newspaper. One day, as a gag, he wrote some stupid placeholder text referring to convicted serial killer Paul Bernardo in one of the draft articles. Hey, you’re 17 years old, and just typing meaningless words like “Lorem ipsum” gets boring after a while.

The principal found out, got really upset, and decided to shake the newstaff up a bit. He even brought in a cop to freak them out.

Well, it worked. Shortly afterwards, Kenneth went to the Bloor St. viaduct, and jumped to his death twelve stories below.

The community was in shock. But I can understand where Kenneth was coming from – the stress of having to be absolutely perfect. I can also understand why the Bloor viaduct (only tourists call it it’s real name, the Prince Edward Viaduct) was such a suicide magnet. It has a great view of the CN Tower, plus the hilly ravines of the Don Valley. It’s easily accessible by subway. It was more elegant than a bottle of pills, less messy than a gunshot.

Bruce Cockburn wrote about it in the song “Anything Can Happen”. Michael Ondaatje wrote a novel about it.

Then again, it’s ridiculous. It overlooks the ten-lane Don Valley Parkway, and the dirty, narrow and shallow Don River. So you fall, break all your bones, and then get run over. Or fall, break all your bones on the river’s bottom, and then drown in sewage. Utter pointlessness.

While Kenneth’s school was absolved of all guilt, his death led to renewed action toward the construction of a suicide barrier on the viaduct. Personally, at the time, I was opposed to it. It’s going to be ugly, and people will just go back to razor blades and bathtubs.

However, I learned recently that our Bloor viaduct was the No. 2 jumping spot in North America, next to San Fran’s Golden Gate Bridge. In the case of the Golden Gate, it’s almost romantic – you’re just whisked away into the Pacific Ocean. Oh, and suffer terrible internal injuries before drowning and being eaten by jellyfish.

A design competition was held, a prof from Waterloo won, and $4 million later, the “Luminous Veil” was unveiled.

Personally, I hate it. The thin white rods don’t go with the bridge’s muscular black ironwork, and the supports are shaped like tilting crosses. So now you’re driving through a gauntlet of errie white crucifixes, looking like you’re on the road to Golgotha.

Then again, no one has jumped from the viaduct since the Golgotha barrier was erected. The locals are relieved that it isn’t totally ugly. Despite all of this, at least several folks have simply jumped from other bridges around town.

Some people, after so much trouble checking into this world, are just so eager to check out.

Junkyard (Mega) Wars has been kind of lackluster this season. Seems that they have scrapped the whole educational and technical angle and replaced it with a contrived “Survivor”-style reality show, complete with fast scene cuts, bickering teammates and loud music. The hosts are complete technical neophytes; the male host is in fact a former contestant on Temptation Island 2, and spends most of his time yelling “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and smashing car windows.

So I’ve turned my attention to Discovery Channel’s Monster Garage. Now in its second season, it involves one hand-picked team of car and metalworking experts building a cool transforming vehicle. Today, I saw them turn a ’96 Chevy Impala SS (you know, the black supercharged version, before it turned into the bland Lumina clone it is today) into a zamboni. The trunk actually opens and a second set of steering controls pops out, and the car lowers the scraping blade to the ground. And it was painted a tight candy apple purple with bumping purple neon floor lights, which never hurts.

What a culture-filled weekend! First Silverlotus and I strolled up Yonge Street, inspecting used bookstores. An interesting thing to note: the science-fiction section is always right beside the pornography.

A little snippet of counter-culture was unexpectedly discovered in the grungy basement washroom stall at a Timothy’s near Wellesley. Despite the fact said stall was half the size of a train’s loo, very very orange and very very dirty, it was resplendent in the words and thoughts of humanity.

It was like reading an online forum. There were the x-rated “For a good time”-esque spam, complete with Hotmail addresses, furious flame wars regarding spelling, and even threads and subtopics. “lim x approaches infinity, the inverse of a B.Sc to the power of x equals a B.A.” one of the non-profane posts went. “Very true,” someone else wrote, with an arrow pointing to the first post.

At night, we descended to the ROM to take advantage of their ROM Friday Nights Fifth Season. We managed to catch a jazz performance by the Bob Mover Quartet, an unfortunately somewhat disorganized bunch with a disapassionate chanteuse, but a good listen in the end.

You know, I used to think the museum was boring, but I am starting to appreciate the time and effort the museum takes to make their exhibits compelling and engaging. We can only see the future by understanding the past, after all. If you work in downtown TO, why not step out of the rat race on a Friday and take a stroll around. It’s free, and all you’ve got to lose is some time.

On Saturday, we grabbed a quick movie at Square One called Lost in Translation, about two Americans plagued with insomnia and culture shock while in Tokyo, Japan. In the end, you see that the world around them is only a metaphor for the loneliness and insecurities inside themselves.

If I could describe this movie in one word, it would be “subtle”. It was subtle in its sparse dialogue, filled with an awkwardness that made the two protagonists seem so real. It was subtle in its quiet, first person perspectives of Japan that would make the Travel Channel proud. The chemistry between the two characters, Bob and Charlotte, are what Producer Sofia Coppola called “romantic but on the edge”, is an undercurrent, much like the mutual and yet unrequited love story in wkw’s “In the Mood for Love”. It’s not a feel-good romance. It’s not a comedy of errors, complete with toilet humour and hilarious hijinks. It takes its time unfolding at the speed of life.

Which leads me to the criticism – a lot of people found it really boring. There are no gunfights or car chases, after all. Some people are offended that the Japanese are used for the gags, and I must admit that things could be a lot worse than being well-to-do and staying at a Park Hyatt Hotel in one of the world’s greatest cities. But I thought the movie was great.

“The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” – Bob Harris (Bill Murray)

On the bookshelf: Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. An amusing fairy tale adaptation, even though I felt like I was reading someone’s school assignment – the book is very short, but it is padded with a big font and doublespacing. And yes, this is the book where Tori Amos has a “cameo” as a talking tree. (She also mentions this in her song, “Beauty Queen/Horses“)

We went to Dr. Sexy and Yuenk’s wedding reception last week. Between the tender stuffed cornish hen, Yuenk’s three wardrobe changes, bouquet AND garter tosses, multiple toasts and the bridal brunch the next morning, it was your basic dream wedding that everyone sees in their mind’s eye. My parents are unwilling to offer any assistance for mine, so I will probably not have a “real” wedding, but that’s just life.

It’s funny, at a wedding you never really get to talk to your friends, you’re always stuck with a strange person at your table (in our case, a breakdancing American), and you always see the groom proclaim to his bridde, while riding piggy-back on the best man, “I am your robot”. OK, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea.

Somewhat topical after my trip to Seattle are these series of special features called the Seattle Daily Times Centennial Stories, which are a compilation of past articles, catching a glimpse of the trials and tribulations that have shaped Seattle to what it is today – from the boom times of the Klondike gold rush and the post-WW2 formation of Boeing Co., to the bust times of the 1980s and the Vietnam war protests.

What you have is a progressive little city, tied as much to its native American and fishery heritage as it is to its state-of-the-art tech industries, where its citizens are as adept in front of a computer as they are hiking in the mountains. At least to me.

I guess they missed me!

We took a quick look at the Museum of Flight – probably the only place we’ve been to that actually accepted the Microsoft Primeline discount card.

Afterwards, we drove around Mercer Island, trying to see if we could find Bill Gates’s house. I’ve only seen it in a photo in a coffee table book called Above Seattle. It’s grey, L-shaped, and along the shore. It’s actually fairly sedate and spartan looking from the outside – even the swimming pool is just a simple rectangle. Alas, we did not see his abode in person, although there were some amazing mansions there. The road is winding and narrow, and I can’t figure out why Allen, Ballmer and Gates could tolerate that every morning, but I guess it’s a moot point since they have chauffeurs.

After loitering around MS, we went to the Pro Sports Club just off the campus.

It has three Nautilus exercise rooms (one dark, which I found pretty novel – it’s for shy people) and five indoor pools. The locker room was actually two floors. The lower floor contains a lounge with TVs, and four whirlpools in a Roman bath style.

Membership fees could be $1,000-$2,000 a year, although I’m not sure – all Microsoft employees have access to the health club and spa, free of charge.

I don’t think I’ve been this relaxed all year.

Hello from the Microsoft Museum! It’s a pretty funky place. More importantly, they have lots of flat panel PCs for Internet access. I’ll probably hang around here, go look for the “Walk of Fame”, and then head back to downtown Seattle.

I’m impressed by the infrastructure here. MSN Internet kiosks in every lobby, parking garages at every building, free shuttles across the campus (and each one is complete with a bucket of sweets). It’s refreshing to see a company that is progressive to do whatever it takes – even if it’s pool tables or arcade games in the lobbies – to make their employees as comfortable as possible, and ergo, as productive and loyal as possible.

Shell got a 19″ Trinitron in her office, and they’ll be replacing that with a LCD flatscreen and adding a TabletPC. Sure, MS works their workers to near-death, but at least they get free pop to drink…