June 2008

Inspired by the “Escalator Spinning” video (which I showed in this entry), some guy decided to give it a try, with less-than-spectacular results…

[My thanks to Chad Nolan for the heads-up!]

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So far, two things that my friend Miss Fipi Lele sent me this morning have made me laugh out loud. The first is the video showing what happens when you smash a can of WD-40. The second is this set of “before and after” photos:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

These look staged, but this remote control Hummer exists and the mishap actually happened when a butterfingered journo for a British tabloid took it for a test drive (here’s the resulting article).

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Apparently, this:

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In preparation for people coming to Accordion City to attend the RubyFringe conference (as well as those of you who are coming here this summer for other reasons), I’m writing Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, a series of articles with useful tips for visiting our fair city.

So far, I’ve published one article: Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?, in which I explained to visiting smokers that you can buy cigarettes in stores here; they’re just hidden in large, featureless cabinets behind the counter.

In this article, I’m going to cover the cheapest way to get to the conference hotel, the Metropolitan, from the airport.

There are Two Metropolitan Hotels!

This may be a source of confusion, so make sure you’re aware of this: there are two Metropolitan Hotels in town. Both are owned by the same hotel chain, and they’re a fifteen-minute walk from each other!

RubyFringe is taking place at the Metropolitan Hotel Toronto, located at 108 Chestnut Street, which is behind City Hall and on the edge of Chinatown. If the front of the hotel looks like the photo below, you’re in the right place:

The other hotel is the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel on 318 Wellington Street West and is a hop, skip and a jump away from Toronto’s domed stadium, The Rogers Centre. If the front of the hotel looks like the photo below, you’re in the wrong place!

(There’s nothing wrong with the Soho Met: it’s a nice place and swankier than the Metropolitan Toronto; it’s just that the conference isn’t taking place there.)

For this article and any other in this series, when I refer to the Metropolitan Hotel, I’m referring to the Metropolitan Toronto, the conference venue.

The Distance

Lester B. Pearson International Airport (airport code YYZ, which is where Rush got the name for their song with Neil Peart’s legendary drum solo) is a bit of a hike from downtown Accordion City. It’s 27 kilometres (about 17 miles) from the airport to the Metropolitan Hotel, a span on par with the distances between Los Angeles International Airport and its downtown core, Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and the Chicago Loop and Newark’s Liberty Airport and midtown Manhattan.

The Most Expensive Way: Renting a Car and Driving (Round trip: $lots)

If you were to drive from the airport to the hotel, you’d get on Highway 427 and go south to the Gardiner Expressway and follow it east. Google Maps says to exit at Spadina, I say take the Bay/York Street exit and follow York Street to where it forks and take the University Avenue fork (Spadina has fewer lanes and is downtown Chinatown’s main drag, which makes it slower going). Either way, you go north to Dundas, at which point you turn east and go a short way to Chestnut Street, where the hotel is.

Google Map showing directions from Pearson Airport to the Metropolitan.
Click the map to see it on its Google Maps page.

The Second Most Expensive Way: Taking a Cab or Airport Limo (Round trip: $90 - 100)

If you were take a cab or airport limo from the airport to the hotel today, it would cost around $40. However, cab fares are going up in July because of skyrocketing gas prices, so a cab ride will probably cost more by the time RubyFringe takes place. The trip should take about 35 - 40 minutes if traffic isn’t too bad. It’s probably the fastest, lowest-hassle way to get to the hotel from the airport.

The Cheapest Way: The TTC (Round trip: $5.50)

The cheapest way to get to the hotel is via public transit — the TTC. It will cost you a grand total of $2.75 and take about 45 minutes to an hour. It involves a bus trip, followed by a ride on the subway.

The first leg of the trip is to take the 192 Airport Rocket bus. It stops at both Terminal 1 and Terminal 3.

(Don’t worry about it not stopping at Terminal 2: it’s being renovated and not being used for anything!)

I know that going to a strange town and not knowing what things look like can throw you off, so I’ve gathered some photos to help orient you. TTC bus stops are marked by signs that look like this:

Here’s what the airport bus stop looks like:

And here’s what a TTC bus looks like:

Make sure that you board only the 192 Airport Rocket bus; it’s an express bus that goes straight to the subway station. The others will eventually take you to a subway station, but they’re regular bus routes and take much longer.

In case you were wondering, the $2.75 fare you pay on the bus will cover the whole trip to the hotel.

Here’s the schedule for the Airport Rocket. The trip to Kipling subway station should take about 20 minutes.

Once you’re at Kipling station, take the train east to St. George station. At St. George station, you’ll go up one floor, which takes you to the north-south-running trains on the Yonge-University-Spadina line. Take the train south to St. Patrick station.

Click the map to see it at full size.

Exit St. Patrick station, and you’ll be a mere two blocks away from the hotel:

The Middle-of-the-Road Way: Airport Express Bus (Round trip: $29.95)

The Airport Express bus stops at both Terminals 1 and 3, involves less lugging stuff around than taking the subway and takes slightly longer than a cab would. It stops at a number of hotels in the downtown core, including the Metropolitan.

They advertise that their buses are WiFi equipped, which might come in handy if you really feel the need to check your email or IM everyone that you’ve arrived.

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With the rising cost of oil putting a damper on travel plans, more people are spending their holidays at home on “staycations” and finding local fun. For starters, you don’t have to go to Vegas for Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics: all you need is the escalator at the nearby mall:

* I am not responsible for mall security pepper-spraying you or for any injuries resulting from your attempts at escalator spinning.

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The comedy troupe Public Service Administration have put together a high-larious video that pokes fun at John McCain’s outburst in which he flipped out and used the “c-word” on Wife 2.0 in 1992.

John’s outburst — “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c***!” was in response to Cindy’s remark about his balding. She was stealing drugs from her own charity around that time, so if John had said “At least I don’t steal drugs from my own charity, you junkie!” it would’ve been a considerably more appropriate comeback.

Then again, she was using the drugs to cope with the stress of the Keating Five scandal, so she can be excused. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

But enough history. It’s comedy time!

Here’s the uncensored, so terribly not-safe-for-work version of the comedy piece, in which the c-word is unbleeped:

And here’s the only-slightly-safer-for-work version in which the c-word is bleeped out, which turns into a bleepfest:

[Thanks to Kelly Seagram for the heads-up!]

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Here’s an old magazine from the late 1960s featuring some hot stars of the time:

• Leonard Nimoy on “religion and dirty movies”,
• Barbara Bain and Martin Landau, back when they were still married,
• William Shatner and his “month-at-a-time” marriage,
• Frank Sinatra (aren’t you wondering why Ol’ Blue Eyes needed to find the youth pill?) and Mia Farrow (then “Mia Sinatra“, which places this magazine sometime between 1966 and 1968)
• and my favourite one: Davy Jones from the Monkees, making a desperate bid for rock authenticity by claiming that he had “pills twice as strong as those that got the Rolling Stones in trouble”.

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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Here’s the opening paragraph for The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, an essay published in The American Scholar and written by an English professor who taught at Yale for the past ten years:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League dees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

Immediately after reading that first paragraph, my first thought was “Isn’t that like an Ivy Leaguer? He realizes that he can’t communicate with working-class people and what does he do? He agonizes about it in a magazine written for Ivy League professors and people who make large donations to their alma mater.” I’m not the only one who made that observation.

(The American Scholar describes itself as “the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932.” People magazine, it ain’t.)

That quibble aside, there’s a lot of interesting material in the article, not the least of which is its discussion of “entitled mediocrity”, another byproduct of Ivy League schooling and one I saw first-hand at Crazy Go Nuts University: the security offered by a “don’t worry about failing, we’ll take care of you because you’re one of us” environment.

“If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education,” says the article in reference to their inability to communicate with “the common people”, “George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale.” Entitled mediocrity is everywhere in the worlds of business and government, from “You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie” to the big salaries and bonuses paid to C-level executives at failing companies.

There’s some discussion about the article here, and you’re always free to put in your two cents in the comments.

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Comedian George Carlin — first Saturday Night Live guest host, creator of the classic “Seven Dirty Words” routine [Warning: language not safe for work*] that started the F.C.C. vs. Pacifica Foundation case and comedic cataloguer of American excess, passed away last night from heart failure. He was 71 years old.

Requiescat in pace, funny guy.

* It’s safe for where I work, but it might not be safe for where you work.

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Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto

In less than a month, the RubyFringe conference will be taking place here in Accordion City (it takes place from July 18th through 20th). RubyFringe is an offbeat conference organized by the offbeat people at Unspace, an offbeat software development shop, with offbeat speakers and MCs (I’m one of them) making some offbeat presentations, which will be followed by offbeat evening events. It stands to reason that it should come with an offbeat guide to its host city, and who better than Yours Truly, one of the city’s most notorious bloggers and a long-time resident, to write one?

From now until RubyFringe, I’ll be writing a series of articles posted under the banner of Joey’s Unofficial RubyFringe Guide to Toronto, which will cover interesting things to do and see here in Accordion City. It’ll mostly be dedicated to the areas in which RubyFringe and associated events will be taking place and provide useful information about Toronto for people who’ve never been here (or even Canada) before. I’ll also try to cover some interesting stuff that the tourist books and sites don’t. If you’re coming up here — for RubyFringe or some other reason — I hope you’ll find this guide useful.

I thought I’d start the series by covering a topic with which I have almost no familiarity: smoking. It’s a safe bet that at least a few smokers will be coming to the conference from outside Ontario: if you’re one of these people, this article’s for you.

The Rules for Smoking in Ontario

If you really feel like poring over a legal document, you can read the Smoke-Free Ontario Act. If you’d rather not slog through the legalese, they can be boiled down to these two rules:

• You have to be at least 19 years old to purchase cigrarettes.
• No smoking indoors in public places.

Canadian Cigarette Brands

You’re going to have to ask someone else about which Canadian brands to smoke. Beyond “quit now,” I can’t really make any recommendations. What I know about Canadian cigarettes versus American ones isn’t much:

• I am told that American cigarettes are “raunchier” than Canadian cigarettes. Can any cross-border smokers comment on this?
• If you’re really homesick for Marlboros, you can get “Rooftop” brand cigarettes, which are Marlboros with packaging that makes use of Marlboro’s “rooftop” design but not the word “Marlboro”. The cigarette marketing site Filter Tips explains these “no-name” Marlboros, if you’re interested.

Canadian Cigarette Warning Labels

If you’re a smoker coming in from the United States and don’t travel outside the country much, you might not be aware that your country has the teeniest cigarette warning labels in the world, despite being the first to put warnings on cigarette packs in the first place.

Here in Canada, cigarettes have to devote half the visible surface of cigarette packaging to health warnings, which have livelier copy and are backed with pictures. Here are my two favourite warnings: first, the “mouth cancer” one…

…and the “trying to stick a marshmallow into a parking meter” one:

If you’re going to ignore the warnings, you might as well be entertained by them, right?

Canadian Cigarette Displays

And finally, I’ll come to the title of this post, Where Did All the Cigarettes Go?

If you set foot into a convenience store here, the first thing you’ll notice after the bilingual packaging is that there are no cigarettes to be seen. What you might see is a blank wall behind the shopkeeper that is almost completely devoid of features or markings. It’s a cigarette cabinet:

An Artcube cigarette cabinet.

This started only a couple of weeks ago in Ontario, when the law banning the open display of cigarettes in stores came into effect. This “out of sight, out of mind”-inspired law requires people who sell cigarettes to store them in featureless cabinets, and it seems that they’re not allowed to post anything on them, even if it’s not tobacco-related. If you wander into a convenience store and are wondering where the cancer sticks are, they’re in the blank cabinets.

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Just for kicks, I thought I’d post some ’60s black and white photos that I rather like.

The first one is exactly how I picture my dream rec room (or, perhaps more accurately, “rumpus room”):

Very few men can pull off an exit from one of those teensy European three-wheeled cars. Cary Grant could:

I really love the lines of 1960s cars (my dream car is a 1966 Plymouth Barracuda):

And finally, this photo, which was originally titled “Why don’t you go make Bullitt some eggs?” Steve McQueen was the man.

My thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for the photos!

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Here’s an oldie but a goodie created by the people at The Wittenburg Door, which is quite possibly the funniest religious magazine ever: Spider-Man’s Greatest Bible Stories!

Found thanks to Miss Fipi Lele.

Also worth checking out: The Rephrasing Spider-Man!

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Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

This is probably a promo for Eddie Murphy’s upcoming film, Meet Dave. Or perhaps they’re making an Eddie Murphy remake of Zardoz.

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I’ve posted more notes from the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference over at my technical blog, Global Nerdy:

Searcher Moms: Microsoft researcher Pavan Li talked about her research of the search behaviour of mothers, an important demographic not just ’cause they’re moms, but because they have the magic combination of education, buying power and being the primary purchasers of goods for the family.

The Golden Triangle: Enquiro Research’s Gord Hotchkiss talks about some new discoveries related to “The Golden Triangle”, the most valuable piece of real estate on any search engine’s results page.

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The Daily Show came up with a pretty good “Obama campaign graphic” about the recent story in two of of his volunteers kept two women wearing headscarves out of a campaign photo:

“Baracknophobia,” said host Jon Stewart, “the irrational fear of hope, has gotten so bad it’s infected Barack Obama’s own campaign.”

You can watch the Daily Show clip at these locations:

• If you’re in the U.S., you can watch the clip on the Daily Show’s site.
• If you’re in Canada, you can watch it on the Comedy Network’s site. (You might be able to watch this clip in other countries as well.)

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