The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

With the Australian federal election coming up in a few weeks — it happens on Saturday, September 7th — it’s time to share an important public service announcement about Australia’s ranked voting system. In a ranked voting system, also known as a preferential voting system, you vote by ranking the candidates on the ballot. You assign a “1” to the candidate you like the most/loathe the least, “2” to the candidate you like second most/loathe second-least, and so on.

The comic below — You Can’t Waste Your Vote, subtitled This is AUSTRALIA, not America — explains how the Australian system works, and as a bonus, it does so quite amusingly:

I’m not too familiar with Australian politics, but I assume that the major parties parodied in the comic are are the current ruling Labor Party (left-leaning) and the Liberal Party (right-leaning), and that the Australia Australia Australia party are a comic stand-in for “The Nationals” (to the right of Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine).

This photo was taken at a Days Inn in the U.S.. Decades ago, having a set of wall-mounted clocks, each one showing the time in a different far-away city, used to be a cheap and simple way of saying “look at me, I’m a citizen of the world!” Nowadays, it just says that you’re looking for a cheap and simple way of faking that you’re a citizen of the world.

To borrow a line from The Matrix: “Whoa.”

No matter where I’ve gone in North America, people have the same complaint: “It’s really hard to date in this city”. Toronto is no exception, and an anonymous, single, not-yet-30 Toronto woman has decided to express this with her Tumblr, Single in Toronto. The intro to the site reads:

It’s been said that Toronto is the worst city in the world to date, meet someone, or find love. That is what it’s like for me. P.S. Toronto still kicks ass a part [sic] from this.

It’s one of those “What Should We Call Me” Tumblrs, which is a reference to What Should We Call Me, a Tumblr that became popular — and then, widely imitated — where entries were everyday situations followed with animated pictures of reactions to them.

Here’s Single in Toronto’s reaction to: “When I find out he lives west of Ossington, north of Bloor, or east of Parliament”…

For you non-Toronto people, those streets mark the boundaries outside which most hipsters never venture.

Here’s: “When he suggests meeting up at Jack Astors, Milestones or Pickle Barrel”…

Do people in Toronto intentionally have first dates at Jack Astors, Milestones, or Pickle Barrel? They’re perfectly decent places, but unless you live deep in the ‘burbs, are doing dinner-and-a-movie and dinner at one of these places is the only possible way the timing will work, or are a character in The Office or Office Space, you should try a little harder and pick a place with some charm and ambiance that wasn’t defined by a specification department from a distant head office. This is especially true for people in Toronto, the city where new restaurants pop up all the time.

And Earl’s is a definite no-no for a first date. It’s for you and your bros to stare at the waitresses, who are hired primarily for their looks. You might as well have your first date at Hooters.

The only acceptable chain restaurant for a first date is Montana’s, only if (a) you go ironically, and (b) you order their best dessert: the straight-from-the-deep-fryer teeny donuts with the powdered sugar and chocolate and caramel dipping sauces. They are magnificent. Okay, the baked-in-a-skillet chocolate chip cookie a la mode’s not bad, either.

Not all the posts are Toronto- or Canada-specific. Here’s one that many people, no matter where they live, can sympathize with: “When I try really hard to remember what sex was like”…

Ouch. We’ve all been there.

If you haven’t given Accordion City’s newest, best, FM radio station, Indie88 (CIND-FM, 88.1 on the FM dial, or via its live internet stream), a listen, I’ve got another good reason for you to do so. Eric Alper, all-round knowledgeable guy on the topic music, music correspondent on CTV’s Canada AM, music blogger, and Facebook friend of mine, will control the music on their Throne of Glory show this afternoon at 4 p.m. Eastern. Tune in and hear what his picks are!

Ten years ago today, at 4:11 p.m. EDT, the power went out through much of the northeastern U.S. and southeastern Canada. I was five weeks into my new job as a tech evangelist at Tucows, located in Accordion City’s Liberty Village neighbourhood. I lived at Queen and Spadina at the time, so work was a leisurely twenty-minute bike commute for me. This would come in particularly handy that day.

When the power went out, there was a collective groan let out by Tucows’ hundred and twenty or so employees. Liberty Village’s aging electrical infrastructure was prone to power outages in those days — back then, the condo projects hadn’t yet bloomed in the area — and it was assumed that this was another “brown-out” and that power would be back in ten minutes.

I figured that it would be a good time to get away from the computer, stretch, and perhaps get a nice cold drink from the convenience store. When I stepped out onto King Street West, it became quite clear to me that the power wasn’t just out in our building. The traffic lights were out of commission and the streetcars were stopped dead in their tracks, literally.

A few of my coworkers went to their cars in the parking lot and tuned into news radio. They were already announcing that the power just wasn’t out city-wide, but in several cities. One guy, a Star Wars fan took a line from The Phantom Menace and quipped “A power disruption could mean only one thing: invasion.” Hey, 9/11 was just shy of two years prior.

We were all told to go home. It was an easy trip for me: I lived pretty close by, and on my bike, I whizzed past the stalled traffic. Along the way, I took some photos with my ever-present digital camera. Remember, this was 2003, when cameras were still a new feature on mobile phones, and they were terrible. I kept a funky-looking Nikon Coolpix SQ strapped to my belt most of the time.

Along the way home, biking east on Queen Street West, I passed by a hairstylist, who finished working on their customers outside, where there was enough light:

With the traffic lights out and subways and streetcars disabled, traffic ground to a halt. A couple of hours later, there would be a number of cars ditched on the streets, some because their drivers decided to stay put or walk home, some because they ran out of gas while idling for a really long time on near-empty tanks:

The streets were pretty crowded with people making their way home on foot. A number of convenience stores were giving away their ice cream:

In my neighbourhood, many people took the opportunity to hang out on their porches with flashlights and battery-powered radios tuned to the news, girding themselves for the darkness that would soon follow:

This blog was also around back during the blackout, and I wrote about it in an article titled It’s the Post-Electrical Age!, Part 1. I never got around to Part 2, and perhaps I should.