Categories
Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Yes, But You Should See the Penalties for Leaving the Plan…

[via Torontoist] The church sign at the corner of Avenue Road and Dupont:

Photo: Church sign saying 'Try prayer -- the original wireless communication.

Furthermore, you have to use UDP

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Uncategorized

In Fact, You Should Probably Just Back Away from Their Cage Very, Very Slowly

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Uncategorized

Missing Man’s Friends Ask For Help

Liz “I Speak of Dreams” Ditz pointed me to a blog entry in which a missing man’s friends are asking for help:

A friend of mine, David Koch, is missing on a mountain in Canada [Grouse Mountain, not far from Vancouver], and

I’m looking for help to publicize his situation so the Canadian

authorities don’t give up looking.

Dave’s the associate publisher on DMReview,

a Thomson/SourceMedia publication. He drove from Seattle toward

Vancouver on Wednesday, stopping in late afternoon to take a tram up a

mountain he and his wife had visited years before. Apparently he missed

the tram back, and attempted to hike down. He hasn’t been heard from

since.

A search effort was organized, but it’s looking like the authorities in Canada are starting to give up.

Dave is a truly great person, and I simply can’t imagine that he

could be left on his own at this point. I’m looking for any contacts

you can suggest in the national media – NYTimes, the wires, broadcast,

etc. – who might be able to recommend a reporter who could help to

publicize Dave’s situation. If you have any ideas as to how we should

go about the process, please email me or call me any time day or night.

"Loneliness is their drug of choice"

[via Just a Gwai Lo] Food for thought from an article in the blog called The Cake Eater Chronicles titled Lonely or Broken?

How many people do you know who seem to have a serious attachment to

being lonely? They’ve made loneliness into their mate and they talk

about loneliness the way some women and men talk about their

significant others. Because those people are out there. I’m sure you’ve

met a few: single women and men who constantly bemoan how if only I could meet the right person

and then never actually get off their ass to do something about it. You

invite them out, you introduce them to someone you think they’ll get

along with, hoping against hope that this will get them to quit their

bitching, or at least move to a new stage of bitching, and five minutes

later—POOF!—they’ve hit the self-destruct button and are back at

your side, bitching and moaning again, about how that person wasn’t

right for them, what were you thinking, etc. They have run back to

their ever faithful mate: loneliness. These are the people, in my

experience, who have the ideal mate all laid out in their mind and they

won’t settle for anything but that, while they know, somewhere in the

back of their mind, that said ideal mate simply does not exist in

reality. They set the bar too high for any mere mortal to pass over.

In other words: there are people out there for whom loneliness is their drug of choice and, boy are they ever addicted to it.

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

A Moment from Christie’s Farewell Party

The scene: The Bishop and the Belcher, a pub on Queen Street West, Accordion City. I’m there attending a farewell party for popular Toronto blogger Christie St. Martin, who’s moving to Brooklyn. I have my accordion, which I’m wearing in “backpack mode”.


Two young women dressed in punk-goth style walk past me while I’m near the bar, talking to Eva.

Woman 1 (to me): Hey, an accordion! Oh, it’s you, Accordion Guy!

Woman 2: Accordion Guy? He’s real?

(This sort of thing has happened before.)

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Ridiculous Quebec French Term for "Script Kiddie"

Photo: 'Arret' sign from Quebec.

The Quebecois are a bit touchy when it comes to the subject of

defending the French language — even more so than the French in

France. While “stop” signs in France have the word “STOP”, which is

considered to be a perfectly acceptable French word by the Academie

Francaise (here’s a writeup in English),

they say “ARRÊT” in Quebec. My sister’s old boyfriend, who came from

France found it laughable in the same way that men who exclaim “It’s

not a toupee, it’s a hair replacement system!” are.

The Quebec equivalent of the Academie Francaise is the Office Quebecois de la Langue Francaise (Quebec Office of the French Language), and they have a suggested Quebec French equivalent for the term “script kiddie”. It’s…

pirate adolescent

As a script kiddie would say, in the argot of IRC and instant messaging: WTF?

(Thanks to Adam Hill for pointing this out to me!)

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods

Sex Advice from Accordion Players!

Patrick Lee pointed me to this Nerve story (some of the ads on the page might not be safe for work): Sex Advice from Accordion Players!

Photo: Sex Advice From Accordion Players.

My only complaint about the article is that they didn’t invite me to contribute!