Category Archives: The Bad

Rough Seas

The Bad, Toronto, Travel, You Stupid Dick 1 Reply

On the downside, SharkBoy’s union just mailed out strike pay applications.

It seems it’s inevitable, unavoidable at this point. Unless some Hail Mary play happens between the pig-headed mayor and the unions, we’re going to see a very messy Toronto over winter.

The question is: how long? Tin foil hatted people are saying that Rob Ford has a plan to keep the strike going long enough to save XX amount of dollars. That or he’s going to staff all these services he’d rather cut with scabs for an indefinite amount of time. Or he just doesn’t give a flying fuck what you taxpayers think, he just needs someone to bully to make him feel good.

For whatever reason, it seems like we’re headed for some drama. And a few weeks (months??) of eating nothing but Kraft Dinner and day old buns purchased at the local No Frills. Thanks Rob Ford for moving the city of Toronto forward!

On the upside: despite this gloom and doom, we are putting a modest down payment on another Disney cruise in exactly 11 months, 10 days. Not that I’m counting.

This trip will be a carbon copy of the Disney cruise/parks trip we did in the spring with a possible variation on “parks before or after the cruise”. Even though when I explain to people that we’re going again and doing literally the same thing, it may sound boring and redundant, but it’s far enough away that we will be needing a little Disney right about then after what could be a very stressful winter/spring.

Fingers crossed cooler heads will prevail.

Canada’s Google

Tech, The Bad, You Stupid Dick 1 Reply

I see that Rogers is getting into the home security business.

This fills me with such dread I can barely contain myself. Thank god I have a blog.

Information is the currency of the internet. The more you have, the more power you wield. And who wields the most information in Canada? Righto, my tin foil hat followers – Rogers! Okay I’m not going to go conspiracy theory on you but I will speculate something here: Imagine a large corporation collecting data on what time you came home, when you usually took vacation, when your kids were online, when you take breaks at the office to check up on your house. Basically all your “down time” collected in a nice pie graph so that they knew when you could be reached for…ads?

Would that not be the greatest thing Rogers could sell to their own marketing people? Or third party ad agencies for a delicious price? Why else get into the home monitoring business? It’s such a innocuous vertical that it baffled me at first – why not update their dinosaur like On Demand channels or improve their digital media streaming infrastructures and make millions like iTunes?

Because right now the money is being made online is knowing where you will be, what you will do and how best to market to you. Rogers has never done anything out of the goodness of their corporate heart and I see this “protecting your family” garbage is the warm piss flying into your face while they take note of when’s the best time to hit you for an iPhone upsell.

Then again, reading through all their online crap about the service makes me think they’re just bumbling their way through another product launch, and that wiring up your home with crap wifi and web cams is a cheap way for them to make a buck. I could be 1000% wrong.

Work With Me, TTC

The Bad, Toronto, You Stupid Dick Leave a reply

Non-Torontonians may gloss over this rant, but here goes.

The TTC is having another public relations melt down. Photos of bus drivers texting while they’re driving are flooding into newsrooms (okay as of today, only 3 so far in as many days). Of course these are getting posted all over the web.

You may recall the initial blow up where the Teet and the Internet came to blows over the Sleeping Ticket Taker (rest his poor soul).

Well The Teet has released the brilliant statement that the public should stop taking pictures of their staff to try to stem the flow of “bad imagery”. How very Egyptian.

To be fair,they aren’t saying “stop reporting our drivers” because they have either video evidence or phone record access of their staff (do they?!) which can correlate with the complaint. That, to me, sounds lame. To me, it sounds like they know they have a problem and just want it to go away.

The union pres for the Teet, Bob Kinnear, has verbal instructions for riders who want to confront drivers who are TXT while driving. He suggests: “I’d say, ‘Do you mind not texting while you’re driving from point A to point B?”

Uh. How about “PUT DOWN THE FUCKING PHONE!” It’s against the law to drive with an electronic device. Or did your drivers not get the memo?

I say take their picture. As long as it doesn’t obstruct what minimal vision they might be reduced to, depending on the driver’s infraction. Safety first, people!

Fail Whale

Celebs and Media, Distractions, The Bad

Twitter is starting to annoy me.

It actually annoyed me from the start. When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was narcissistic, restrictive and destructive to the structure of the web. Example, all those shortened URLs aren’t only a security risk – you could click through to a phishing page, thank god for Macs! – they’re also reliant on a third party to serve up your link. Take it out and there will be millions of broken links to piss off search engines and anal retentive SysAdmins.

Twitter is the junk food of the internet.

With all this in mind I started to Twitter anyway. I followed celebrities and news journos and did enjoy getting their tweets. Still do. Some people post things that are the best of the web. It’s a great way to know when someone updates a blog/video/image etc. It’s great for information.

But lately as my private, non “professional” base of following/followers grows, I’m finding Twitter a lot like something familiar, something 1999…

Oh that’s right! Gay.com’s chat widget.

The majority of the people I follow on Twitter have started to use it as a chat program. I don’t know if this is a trend or if it’s just the type of person I follow. In the morning, I’m shifting through “HI! GOOD MORNING TWEEPS!” “HEY HOW YOU DOING?” posts and their equally important “HEYWAZTUP?” responses – meaningless manusia. During the day I have to skip past “EWWW! NO!” posts when someone mentions feminine hygiene. Or requests to add things to my avatar in the name of some social cause.

Don’t get me started on FollowFriday. On second thought, lets: #FF is utterly useless. If I want to know who you’re following I’ll take the time and click your profile. With the new Twitter page and other slick apps, it’s dead easy. Stop sending out your entire 150 names in 4-5 posts, filling my timeline with garbage!

This crap has no meaning to me. And I like it when Twitter has meaning. Has value. Now, to me, it’s becoming a really slow and irritating IRC channel.

Rant over. Back to your lives, humans.

(posted to Twitter 11:28am, Friday November 5th)

Cropdusting

The Bad, Toronto, You Stupid Dick

Last night, two stops from my destination, the subway decided to catch fire and I was forced, along with half of Toronto, to walk down Yonge Street.

I’m not complaining. I like a good walk after work. What got me pissed was having to walk behind a lot of smokers, which meant I had to endure clouds of second hand smoke and ashes blown in my direction. Ugh.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Urban Dictionary version of “crop dusting“:

Passing gas in a stealth manor [sic], usually while walking through a crowd or a group, so that someone else gets blamed for the stench, or at the very least people besides the assailent [sic] must suffer it.

Yes. I did a couple last night.

The twist on this tale, my friends, is how I alert SharkBoy that I’m going to assail some poor bastard behind us. This is what I say:

“Okay so he gets off the bus and he’s standing in the middle of a field all alone. Crazy long shot of him utterly alone. Two roads converging in the middle of nothing. And him alone! And suddenly a plane comes from no where and brrrooooffmfppp! It tries to run him down! A plane. Tries to run down Carey Grant. Forget that if anything touches your prop on a plane, you instantly crash. But on the second pass, a machine gun is fired, so that’s ok…”

I could go on but by this time I’m all farted out. Now all I have to say is: “He gets off the bus and it’s like, nothing around!” poot.

Anyway, back to last night.

I’m about to pass this munchkin of a man who is smoking like a drag queen (draws in a toke, throws head back and with pursed lips, exhales in a thin fast stream of vile choke). As I approach, he looks over his shoulder to see if any buses are coming. We lock eyes. My eyes say “you dirty fucker” because I’ve had to endure a block and a half of his weird smoking and ash flicking. His eyes say “get over yourself, Mary”.

I cut in front and release the solitary Carey Grant from my ass.

Actually that’s where my story ends. No sharting, no coughing, no other incident. Sorry.

Twitter’d

political, The Bad, Toronto, You Stupid Dick

Yesterday I got mildly bewildered after reading about how (yet again) Rob Ford managed to be completely clueless about the social/political leanings of a room full of people he was going to debate in. I guess his crack team of minders forgot to tell him he was going into a room full of leftie-liberals.

I was tired of the whole political posturing at the beginning of this mayoral race and after reading that I was exhausted. None of these candidates spark anything but contempt from me. Some more than others, and I’m afraid that’s how I’m going to vote.

What is getting me down more is the rabble that pounce on any mayoral news story that has it’s comments turned on, ready to vilify anyone who has not forgotten that they had a joint on them when stopped by the cops in Florida.

In my ire, I twittered this:

So very tired of this #voteTO. Especially the “mad as hell” idiots who will blindly lead this city into another Lastman embarassment

Within seconds I was replied to by someone claiming to be a “lawyer” from Vaughn saying sarcastically “yeah how dare the suburban crowd be upset with how Toronto is run…” etc.  He fired off a couple blathering tweets about “downtown sensibilities” and I thought best if I block him, so I can’t quote him directly. His past tweets concerned themselves with how Michele Obama is ruining the US – you get the drift – raving neo-con teabagger.  My next tweet:

Irony, thy name is hashtag

Yeah I know I was asking for it in a public forum, the irony isn’t lost on me, but the speed and venom that this person appeared out of the woodwork convinces me that this election won’t be won by intelligence or by rational decision making. The pitchforks are out, the people are mad as hell and they’re at the gates.

http://www.thestar.com/article/853234

Chip Chippery Chip Chip Cheroo

The Bad

Last night while eating home-made chicken nuggets (low fat, baked, of course) I chipped the inside of my tooth while biting down on a fork.

Yes. I know. I was eating a chicken nugget with a fork. You can’t call me uncooth.

For some weird reason I was holding my fork nearly vertical with the succulent, plum sauce covered morsel skewered upright on my fork. I guess I didn’t want the sauce to drip which resulted in me biting down hard on the prong, like an idiot.

Crek!

SharkBoy looked up from his plate. “What was that?”

“Moof!” I say. I half spit half swallow what was in my mouth and run to the mirror, expecting to look a bit Appalachian with a cracked tooth smile staring back at me.

Thankfully it was intact. However, there is what feels like a horizontal groove in the back of my tooth. As well, the groove catches on my bottom tooth when I relax my mouth and set my teeth together. I swear my tooth is swollen.

Coupled with the maddening tongue touch I have to do every 2 seconds, I’m slowly driving myself mad.