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Next summer T.O. plans to let you drink publicly , or at least in parks and on beaches.   So far so awesome, but I have questions.  For example, does the parking lot in front of Walmart count as a public park?  If not, what is the point of the legislation?  That's where the LCs and the beer-stores are to start with.  And what is the definition of "a glass"?  As far as I'm concerned a bottle in a bag is a glass with a slightly unorthodox shape and permanent storage capabilities (ie. the cap, until you drop it or throw it away).  Again, we are left awaiting details.   The city further notes that any site cleared for public consumption of alcohol will need bathroom facilities; luckily, in Scarborough, that can mean some trees behind a gas station. In related news, T.O. also plans to have extra security in the parks starting this summer, so homeless folk won't gather around their campfires to tell stories, sing songs, and pitch tents for she...

Visited The Elsy (LCBO) today.  I notice that while they're knifing each other over toilet paper at the Walmart across the parking lot, here everything is calm.  People believe that Water and wipes are essential, booze some kind of peripheral benefit.  These people are fools!  Give it a couple of weeks, when they have all been forced to spend time at home  WITH THEIR CHILDREN!  No Porn.  No sports but for  UFC fighting and repeats of Ali vs.Antonio Inoki    They will cry out for the sweet darkness that alcohol brings! I will liquidate my stock of toilet paper on the toilet paper Dark Net, buy Pabst up the yin-yan and in April gouge these pathetic yokels until they squeal!   BOOYAH!

This evening at the local Metro  I saw something resembling "panic buying".  Not quite at that point. Nobody got violent.  More like the kind of lineups you see before the Superbowl or a long-weekend.  Except everyone, everyone, was buying toilet paper and bottled water.  Nobody was buying beer. Which doesn't make any sense: you buy toilet paper and bottled water when you're expecting the Zombie apocalypse, or basic services to fail, not when you're expecting a sharp economic downturn.  I wonder if these people know something I don't?

Was inside the Jian Hing market at Markham and Lawrence on Family Day, looking for Filipino  Pork Rinds.  They have about 40 different varieties at Jian Hing.  I'm not kidding, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but.  Filipino  Pork Rinds are basically deep-fried pig-skin; you can get them either  "fat on" or "fat off", which means there's chunks of deep-fried pork-fat still stuck to them, or not.  I usually buy the "fat off" kind.  I prefer  the "fat on" version, but if I eat too much my sodium level spikes and the water in my inner ear backs up and I get the bed-spins for a week. So I'm in the cash-line behind this old Filipino guy.  He looks at my 2 big bags of Chicharron Old Fashioned Fat Off Flavor  and asks.  "You like those?" I say: "Yes.  They're good, not good for you.  I know that." And he laughs and tells me how they eat them back home.  Apparently, they dip them in vinegar, which seems red...

WTF happened?  Did the dispatcher pass out just before the storm hit?  Did the plow-guy bust a leg trying to smuggle a hooker into the barracks through a back window?  Or did they stop at VP and say Fuck it its Scarborough lets turn around and plow The Bridle Path twice?   The city's East-end this morning is a snowy hell-scape with near impassable roads!  But the thing is, as soon as you get North of Steeles the streets are bare, even the side-streets...even the arena parking lots.  So it can be done.  And yet Markham Road, the main drag out this way, is like the trail out of Zeballos.  If I wanted to live in the countryside, I would move there.  Scarborough should secede and join Markham, or maybe Pickering, whoever gives the best deal on snow-plow services.  I hear there's always something exciting going on in Pickering.

So the wife and I spent our evening  on the balcony of our condo unit drinking a bottle of wine.  We noticed a flock of  gulls in the air, surfing the turbulence in advance of a line of storm clouds.  These were  the same gulls that usually inhabit the roof of a Metro across the parking lot from us, standing in their 100s in the shallow puddles that form after a rain.  Normally you imagine them groundlings, begging for a wedge fry from people going to and from their cars. But tonight they had all taken to the air. And they were like a mob of kids on their skate-boards.  This was not about looking for a meal.  It was all about skidding sideways like the guys in Tokyo Drift, but through the sky, and diving and darting and pulling a rivals tail-feathers in full flight and swooping low and then sailing 100% vertical on a hot  current. And their squawking seemed exultant, not at all like the sound they make fighting over the spilled guts of a squi...

The lady bus driver on the bus today was wearing a nose-ring.  And the TTC let her drive the bus like that.  She was a white chick so it couldn't be a religious accommodation thing.  But people will get on her bus and see her nose-ring and think fuck why shouldn't I commit some crimes for  a new time of Barbarism has surely arrived?   I come from an era before tattoos and frivolous adornment and I am telling you today's young people are armoring up to look fierce for the dark ages they see descending, what with nothing but shit jobs on the horizon and the only way of advancement mortal combat, possibly with an AI enhanced yuppy scumbag.  But public institutions like the TTC should be holding the line against Chaos, at least until I can retire and get my consciousness uploaded into The Matrix and get away from this shit.  So I say the TTC dress code should have no place for nose-rings. That is all.

Famed serial killer Paul Bernardo graduated high-school from Sir Wilfred Laurier Collegiate, down in The Guild. Apparently they've left the picture of his graduating class (him included) on the wall there. I was down in The Guild today and heard a story I didn't know: that every year the picture goes missing a few days before graduation, as the kids ride it around Scarborough on public transit.  Then it reappears on the wall when nobody's looking.  I have no idea whether this story is true but if it is: that's the spirit, kids!

So the condo corp held a big meeting the other night.  They rented a room at the local community center.  They'd already sent around a letter so everyone knew what it was about; the building has Kitec plumbing.  You can look it up but the stuff was manufactured between 1995 and 2007 when the  number of recalls they were getting made them stop.  Under certain circumstances it wail fail prematurely, and when it fails it blows (splits, more technically) and you get floods.  The meeting was held so the condo Board could tell us we would have to pay about $3,500 to $5,000 per bathroom, and maybe more in the townhouses, to get it removed. So despite the fact that the engineer Atilla wasn't overly communicative, and they had mic problems, it didn't become a shit-show.  I said my bit urging caution--I know a lot of folk in the R.E. profession who think this is more media driven than real (remember UFFI?)--but in the end the decision to re-plumb the whole place...

On the bus in Scarborough this morning two youths were listening to angry gangster rap music on headphones.  They were both rapping along fiercely to completely different tunes. They became quite loud, and it sounded like they might scrap.  But in fact the two never became even aware of one another's presence. Also, if you are stuck behind a City garbage truck long enough, you notice that they have steering wheels on both sides .  I didn't know this before that but it makes sense. That is all. Oh, and there are folks down in The Guild protesting a new condominium project because it will "block their view", but their view is of a couple of public housing towers from the 1970's that look like they'll blow over in a storm, so... People just like to complain. That is all.

I've timed it on several occasions, and when I set my washing machine to Express Wash, it tells me the wash will take 30 minutes.  But it doesn't, it takes 37 minutes.  Everything is fine until the last minute of the cycle, which takes 7 minutes.  This seems dangerously misleading on the part of the manufacturer.  You could be washing interview gear in there.  You could lose a shot at a good job if you showed up 7 minutes late. And then your marriage could fall apart, and you could wind up addicted and homeless, sleeping in that porta-potty they left unlocked down by where they're renovating the Guildwood Inn. This isn't about me, by the way.  I'm good. There are larger issues at stake. How could something like this happen in 2017?  Russian hackers hacking the Internet Of Washing Machines? Something must be done.

Was sitting in my favorite working man's pub out in Scarborough today, and heard something which I thought was quite deep.  One of the fellows at the bar said: "If you can't laid in Cuba, you can't get laid anywhere."  Which is a fact that many other people have told me is so. Perhaps today more than ever we should acknowledge the inherent wisdom of the white working class.

I hear a guy at the bar today, talking.  He says:  "Hey, you know what a union is, don't ya?  It's a bunch of drunk guys fallin' off a roof." The guy's in construction.  He's management.

I was sitting in my favorite Scarborough workin' man's pub today, listening to a couple of truck drivers talk. They had just got off shift and were discussing  an accident on the 401 .  "Scrape 'em off and get it clear" was their general attitude (although I should note it doesn't look like anyone was injured in this particular incident). They're both nearing 60; they talked of when Kingston Road was called Highway 2, and York Road before that, conveying traffic from Toronto to the Eastern settlements a century ago.  Because they drive, and this kind of history is important to them.  Then they got talking about "self driving vehicles" for a bit, skeptically and cautiously.  But they're fine.  They'll retire before that wave of innovation hits.  But after them comes a vacuum.  Because a self-driving car won't "know" anything; it will just store data.

So I finally pulled the plug on my '97 Cavalier yesterday afternoon.   I feel OK about it.  I'd put a new engine in last February and hoped this would squeeze a few more years out of the thing.  But it was like sewing a shiny fresh metal heart to a bunch of rusty old organs.  It shook them to bits with its vigor.  Everything ancillary has failed over the past six months.  I finally told Crappy Tire to pull the plug at noon on Sunday. and an hour later when I was driving by in my emergency rental I saw a tow-truck hauling it off to automobile heaven.  Bye bye old car!  I won't miss a CD -player where you had to open the trunk to change CDs.  I won't miss the pain in my guts from thinking that this drive might be the one where the car failed somewhere in the 905 area code, where rural primitives allegedly still raise "pigs" and "cows", and occasionally eat city folks whose cars have stalled.  My one regret is that I never managed to have s...

Was on the bus today, and listening to a couple of young kids talk about rock music.  One of them wore a Motley Crue t -shirt, out of teenage irony.  Another one thought Alice Cooper was a girl. These kids are doomed.  You can't get through life with this low degree of cultural knowledge. There's no hope for them other than gangsterism.

I was sitting in my favorite workin' man's pub in The Scar when it hit!  Sideways rain, hail, patio umbrellas falling over!  The works! Total fuckin' Apocalypse! Later, making my way South down Markham road through the wreckage, I saw this! This isn't the tree that fell at Lawrence and Scarborough Golf Club Road that everyone's talking about.  No!  This is ANOTHER TREE!  In a POORER PART OF SCARBOROUGH that the Media Party pays no attention to.  BUT TREES STILL FALL HERE!  whether the CBC or anyone else cares or not! And I actually sat down at the bus shelter that this tree had fallen on top of, and I could hear ominous creeking and cracking noises.  This sucker could give way any time!  And its laying across live wires, so innocent bus riders underneath could get crushed and electrocuted all at once!  OMG!!!  OMG!!!  OMG!!! But we're tough out here in The Scar , which we also call The Bro (for reasons I won't elucidate at th...