Our plane hit the tarmac in Miami just after 3pm and we came out of the airport to somewhat heavy heat. Our taxi ride to the hotel was stop and go over into South Beach but we did pass by the cruise ship terminal where I got to see a Carnival ship (boo hiss!).

The Best Western on Washington St should be avoided at all cost. It may boast Art Deco and competitive rates but it certainly doesn’t offer anything else beyond that. The pool is 5 feet away from a street as busy as Bay St! The room smelled weird and the front desk guy (who seemed to live behind the desk the entire 24 hours we spent there) would not cash USD$ travellers cheques. But you know what? We didn’t spend that much time in the room other than to sleep (we were so tired there could have been a knife fight outside the door and we would have missed it) and to shower. So it was fine but no great shakes. After dumping our luggage we took off to wander the streets of Miami’s South Beach.

Amazing architecture! The colours and shapes were amazing to see and I was glad that we took the extra day to see it all. The damage to Miami didn’t seem too bad but there were a few blown out windows and missing sign letters.

The main strip was fun to walk down and watch the rich tourists wander in and out of posh, pastel neon lit lobby bars. In this particular hotel, I felt like I was walking right back into a ’50s hotel. We were later chased out of the hotel by security thugs. Sheesh!

Colourful characters lined the boardwalk. It was a real party town. We ate like kings at Outback Jack’s and had a long walk in the near full moon light along the beach. I was really looking forward to getting on the ship!

Tune in tomorrow for more!

Gallery pics.

This morning I had my boss under my desk on his hands and knees.

The Great Canadian Dream?

No.

He brought his dog into the office on the weekend and the poor pooch puked all over the underside of my desk for some reason. When I told the boss, he was quickly down there cleaning.

I’m impressed! He’s the owner of a large(ish) company and he takes responsibility for his dog’s barf.

In between my legs.

Sunday, 1:20pm, Jan 08, 2006

No Frills, Carlton and Parliament

Sharkboy and I are in line with our meager purchases and in front of us are two exquisitely rotund women purchasing the largest amount of consumer meat I have ever seen. Enough ground beef to reconstitute a cow, 7 packs of half chickens (three and a half chickens?), 6 packs of thick sliced ham, drumsticks to beat the band to submission and various other sundries.

While one loads stuff onto the conveyor belt to be scanned, the other is packing all this meat into bags. The one packing meat, dressed in white sweats, hoody still up, answers a call on her cell, magically produced from one of her folds, with “Why are you calling me?” Pause. Louder. “WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME?” The uber-rubenesque one unloading their groaning shopping cart stops her meat-haulin’ and looks up at Hoodie.

Hoodie continues: “My own child and you’re harassing me with these calls. I told you not to call.” To the Unloader: “Harassment!” Back into the cell: “You’re harassing me. You. Are. Harassing. Me.” The drama continues in this vein. Meat starts to back up on the conveyor belt, sadly wanting to be packed into embarrassingly yellow NO FRILLS bags.

And in the drama, Unloader lady “forgets” to put a single package of bacon up on the belt (I’m still trying to figure out why all this meat and yet one single package of bacon…). She pushes the cart through (note to self: no alarms went off) and instantly starts to put bags of meat into the cart, covering the poor forgotten bacon.

I bet you can see the finger quotes around “forgets”. It was a bit too fast and a bit too obvious.

The bacon was the last thing in the cart making it pretty difficult to missed putting it on the belt. While Hoodie’s harassing drama was loud and distracting (the poor cashier was wincing at Hoodie’s verbal cell phone lashings to her child), Unloader pushed that cart through to the bagging area pretty darned fast.

Sharkboy was on his tippy toes wanting to say something.

The time comes to pay and Unloader hands over five $20 Loblaws gift cards. My oh-so-judgemental mind says “trailer trash!” as they fuss and haul and grunt their fodder into their cart, Hoodie still sputtering about being harassed by her kid.

“Do you think karma will come back onto us for not telling the cashier about that bacon?” asks Sharkboy, in a moment of boyfriend zen.

“I think karma will rear it’s ugly head when they get anal cancer from all that meat,” I suggest.

As we leave the C’est Ne Frills Pas, Unloader (now switching her name to “Loader”) is bag-by-bag placing their meaty booty to the trunk of their Cadillac sedan because they are unable to get the cart past the iron gates by the door. Hoodie, unhelping of Loader, glares at us as we walk by, exposing the dirtiest interior I have ever seen of such an expensive car.

An addictive and fun game.Love the Crazy Cat Lady. (From Boingboing)

So the power thing…yeah… Lots of inconvenienced people. Not me. It was business as usual. It was cool to see the dead street cars placed every two blocks, sort of reminded me of that Canadian move “Last Night”.

So about this homeless guy I have the hots for:

I ride the streetcar pretty much every day and I pass by a temp hard labour agency on Queen and Sherbourne. He’s there as early as 8am to 10am-ish. He’s just over 6ft, with a sandy blond goatee. He always wears jeans (which fit well), has a napsack and a baseball cap. Some days he sits, some he’s standing leaning against a storefront doorway, his crotch nicely buntched up. He’s rough. But a good rough. I find this whole thing weird…I wonder what it would be like to find out someone likes me from afar. Id probably be all shy and withdrawn and shit. One day I got enough balls to cycle by him and he didnt even notice…no suprise there. Ive made up an entire imaginary home life for him and tacked on this bizzare bi male fantasy where he experiments with me. What can I say? The streetcar is boring.

“You know, a cat can go through a hole half its size,” she says to her mother.

I wonder about that a moment. I want to butt into their conversation with:

“Which half? Lengthwise? Just at the ribs?”

I love a good robot bezerker story. And the irony is that this happened in a hospital.

Even further on the irony scale is that the original story comes from The San Fran Chronicle and the permalink goes to a page about Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Two of my coworkers have confirmed the exsistance of a brand spaking new Toronto Icon:

I give you Zanta!

Unfortunately no pictures of Zanta are available…yet! You will know Zanta by his big, muscular shirtless frame, pec tattoo and jaunty Santa cap (“Look Mommy! Santa!” “NO! Not Santa! I’m Zanta with a ZEE!”). Zanta likes to produce flowing rants of personal freedoms and will demand that you watch Speakers Corner for his 60 seconds of informative fame.

One co-worker tells me of Zanta’s run in with the man during one of the performances that took place during the Eglinton street festival this weekend. Zanta was “Hulk-Hoganning” during a busker’s show which angered many a good folk, causing the police to show up brandishing batons of pain. Zanta was hustled away to a safe area and the show continued uninterrupted, thankfully!

The other co-worker speaks of his usual stomping ground at Queen and John, where he usually informs beautiful women that they are “princesses” and they should be aware of his free speech.

We WELCOME ZANTA to Toronto!’

UPDATE: Well don’t I feel out of the loop. Even CityTV’s forums have whispers of Zanta. That’s the last time I ramble off without Googling it. And my one co-worker was wrong, no chest tatt.

Sorry for the outage, kids. Who knew you had to point nameservers to the new boxes that host this site after the original owners pulled up stakes and moved on? There wasn’t much I could do out there in the wild, unless I warchucked and we all know that logging into someone’s unsecured wifi is wrong.

Speaking of stakes, expect blow by blow blog entry and pics from camping soon. One hundred and fifty some odd shots to sort through to post for your fun and ridicule. See video of Condoleeza Rice showing off her bad self! See a beached whale! See more of the same but funnier. I hope.

Thanks to Evil Panda and Griz for a great week. Looking forward to your next visit, boys. Bring Off.

My initial reaction to MLT’s eleventieth Ball was one of “same ol’ same old” but after a few drinks I did warm up to it.

For the last few Leatherballs (tee hee!) at the Opera House, they’ve been moving the DJ around to different places within the venue which changes things up a tad but Saturday’s dance had the DJ on the stage. He was under an impressive well lit scaffolding with demos and go go boys as accoutrements, but this set up was a bit “pushy” since there was some distortion on a few tracks. New equipment? Was it the acoustics? Who can say. The music was good and a couple tracks had me bopping.

I love the Opera House. It’s a personal space and much more interesting/intimate than The Guvernment. Unfortunately the sound does seem to bounce around like the tweeking child that insisted on dancing (?) beside me (on me?) for the better part of the evening. Which brings me to…

When we got there, we shuffled to our favorite spot, dead centre of the middle tier. From there you can see everyone coming and going to the dance floor. Unfortunately about 8 guys were already there and their E had kicked in a bit too early, making them jostle around and touch each other like tactile zombies. One complained that he probably didn’t time it right and he was going to crash about 6am. Wow. Too bad. We had a few drinks by that time so I can’t preach about drug use within the gay community, but I can say (again) that I don’t understand the whole drug culture thing. If I start kissing you, am I kissing you because you want to or that some chemical tells you to? I’d rather kiss a toaster and have the certainty.

We left fairly early, just around 1am. In all, I would give it a C.