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Pride Tips for Out of Towners, 2009 Edition

ketchup_prideSo you’ve decided to visit Toronto and enjoy it’s #2 outdoor attraction (second only to The Beaches Jazz Festival, according to their site).  Regardless of who tells you their numbers are numero uno, Toronto Pride reels in a crapload of cash for the city (The Gay Community has it’s own subsection on Toronto’s tourism website – take THAT Caribana!). It’s a good idea to research your options before opening your wallet and organize your fun before hitting the street.

That’s where I come in! Hello tourist! So glad I could help!

You may recall my article last year: Pride Tips for Out of Towners. I’m bitter happy to report that not much has changed. The bar you are drinking in will have a draconian liquor inspector grumpily wander through to see if they can make some money in fines. And some circuit party will try to seduce you with their glossy posters of near-naked men, but there will be a chance that you choose incorrectly and spend $95 to find you’re not at  the “A-List” bash and wind up with a crowd that looks more at home at a Phish concert. The Parade tips still hold true (early, sunblock, elbows), as do the street crowd crush. Don’t forget that “bagging and bedding a Torontonian” is still a bit like coaxing a snipe out of the bushes. We seem to have tightened our shy little cocoons around ourselves during this long, cool spring! All I reported last year are still valid tips. Take heed!

At this time I need to reiterate my number one peeve about Pride: You should NOT, repeat NOT eat at any restaurant on Church Street during Pride. Eat from a hot dog cart (blarg!), bring your own food, starve, devour your travel companion or gnaw on your own foot. Do not eat at any Church Street restaurant.

Wait… I think I need to nail that home:

DO NOT EAT AT ANY CHURCH STREET
RESTAURANT THAT IS LOCATED ON
CHURCH STREET DURING PRIDE

Got it? Just want to let you know. All restaurants will take you in their arms, whisper sweet nothings in your ear, thrust a pre-set menu in your hands and then jizz in your face while rifling through your wallet for your cash. And not in a good way.

Here’s a list of restaurants that are off the strip and worth your money:

Daybreak – This place is popular, pricey but has big portions. At the corner of Carlton and Church, just outside the Village.

Studio – When Daybreak is full, two doors south is this crumbly greasy spoon. Cheap alternative great for breakfast.

The Coachhouse – Same as The Studio, but over on Yonge and Wellesley. Greek twist on a diner.

Chew Chews, Johnny G’s and Gourmet Burger – Three Cabbagetown options that are a little walk away from the Village.

Sizzler – Late Late night burger place with baby sized meat patties at Yonge and College. Not much to look at but BABY SIZED BURGERS!! Late at night!!!

Olympic Pizza – Been in the village forever. Consistently good but unremarkable Italian food the recipe for a great restaurant!

Tokyo Grill / Okanomi House – uncommon Japanese food (read: NOT sushi).

Ginger – Not the one on Church, but over at Yonge and Bloor, there’s an outlet that will most likely not fuck you for cash. Great non-restauranty hot and sour soup.

Oja Noodle House – Right beside a pricey “EggRoll” restaurant. Dishes more authentic and way cheaper. Charles and Yonge.

That’s a good start. Yonge at Bloor has had an explosion of Asian Fusion dining places. All seem “good” if not a bit dollar-y.

New tips? Got a couple!

Photography

photo5In some cases it’s polite to ask if you can take pictures of random hot guys/gals/gender-fucks, but in most cases it doesn’t matter – cameras are everywhere during Pride and if you’re shy, stay the fuck home! But asking for a photo is not only as polite as a Canadian in a foreign land, it’s an excellent way to break the ice.  So if you do go this route, may I suggest little business cards with your Twitter/Flickr/Facebook page URL on it so you can ensure your subject can view your work later when they’re at home slathering on the aloe vera. And for those people you were jokingly taking a picture of (“Good lord that outfit!! I must ridicule it online tonight!“) and get caught doing so, may I suggest a separate card with www dot lemonparty dot org on it.

Street Escape Routes

I failed to mention last year that to avoid the crush that is the uncomfortably crowded street in front of Woodys and the parking lot Beer Tent (Church and Maitland), the Pride Committee has smartly enshrined the alleyways behind these two venues open for easier access past this bottle neck. There are similar North-South routes between East-West streets if you need to dash up Church Street. Any Pride volunteer will gladly point them out.

Texting

Keep your cell phone charged. The crowds are so large you will want to know where your friends are. Twittering may not be such a good idea since it goes down more often than a career drag queen 2 days before rent is due. Thankfully iPhone users will have MMS texting by then and you can send your friends your location (or trick’s face) for group approval.

And lastly:

Your Outfit

Please take some time to consider what you will wear. Feather boas are for straight boys who were dragged to Pride by their girlfriends. Outrageous drag is fine, but consider it will be hot and you may be outside for some time. Melty creatures does not equal funny drag. You’ll scare children. May I recommend something clever yet not too noticable…

Whatever you do, enjoy your Pride. If you see me, say Hi!

Disney 2009 – Dining


img_0904I have nothing new to report about Disney, per se. Yes it’s still the pinnacle of customer service. Yes the rides were just as fun. Yes, Stacey was the first person you saw when you turned on the hotel TV. It was all the same yet the familiarity was like going to a friend’s house who has 1000% better home electronics than you do. 

Not much has changed since my last vacation there, except for a few tweaks (for the better) to their services and a couple new rides. I won’t repeat myself for the sake of old time readers. Know that while there wasn’t any bed-jumping videos of excitement, the emotion of being there was just as strong.

Collectively between three cameras (not including the Photopass service Disney provides), I estimate we took close to 2500 pictures. I’ll be posting some here but the brunt of them from my camera will be on Flickr for your perusal. Don’t expect captions for all!

Now, on to the subject at hand: Food!

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Know that we had absolutely NO bad meals on any of the Disney properties (including third party chain eateries). That isn’t to say all our meals were perfect: when we discovered that Oh Boys! on Colonial Drive in Orlando had been closed for a while (update your website you dicks! That includes you, Google Earth!), we motored back to Downtown Disney and still managed to have a great meal – at twice the price, unfortunately. My only complaint is that all manner of food at Disney World is shockingly expensive. While we were eating in moderate to “classy” places like Coral Reef Restaurant at EPCOT (blackened catfish!) or The Crystal Palace (Character Breakfast with Eyore!) at Magic Kingdom, I still dreaded the bill at the end of the meal.

The only time I noticed a staff, err… Cast Member not entirely in tune with a high level of good service output was at the Beaches And Cream Ice Cream Parlour. See video below. I think this was her one thousand time serving up this kind of sundae just on this day, to screaming over-sugared children, made evident by the robotic delivery of the room-stopping announcement (but she does save herself at the end with the “young” comment, blessherheart):

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The most surreal meal we had was at The Grand Floridian – Afternoon Tea in the Garden View Room. The room was Mary Poppins Perfect: vaulted ceilings, Victorian styling and proper china tea pots. No fart jokes here. I found the atmosphere a bit intimidating, like walking into a $100/plate restaurant wearing Old Navy. Actually, that’s exactly what I did. But the waitress never made me felt like I had. Her timing was infallible and her service top notch.

The other patrons made me think of bored, rich  housewives having to actually socially interact with their immaculately dressed children while the husbands were off avoiding their kids playing golf and the nanny had the day off. Oh no, no rides for these tykes! They had to enjoy liver sandwiches with no crusts and were ordered to sit on their hands until the meal was finished.

At least that’s what I imagined going on at the table beside us.

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At one point Sharkboy decided to let loose with a bawdy, off colour joke and proceeded to laugh heartily. Suddenly he stops and says in his best educated voice:  “Pardon me. Ha. Ha. Ha.” We all snickered like kids in school.

Our last meal was a pizza on our hotel bed, tired out of our minds from 9 days of walking, riding, laughing and just having fun. It was the perfect last meal for all the sensory overloading.

CP24 To Offer Breakfast Television Some Youthful Competition?

First, let me preface this post by apologizing to all my non-Toronto readers. Go look at my Flickr account, this post will not interest you.

I’ve steadily been having a big hate-on for Breakfast Television since it’s sale to Rogers and its long, slow departure from CityTV/CTV while remaining on CTV’s news channel. The choppy and awkward station ID/commercial flips between the two has been like trying to track a schizophrenic family member’s conversation who hasn’t taken their meds in months. For the last month or so, any fan of Breakfast Television who watches on the CP24 channel will have noticed that when BT goes to commercial, CP24 kicks in with “More On CP24!” teasers of weather and traffic.

Let’s just get past the fact that the bumper title is dangerously close to “MORON CP24!” if you’re not watching the screen closely…

Besides being utterly maladroit (like that? I have Thesuarus.com open), these extra reports of traffic and weather are an additional assault of already mentioned information (it’s fucking scrolling across the bottom already!!), jazzed up with an odd segment of Cam Woolley driving around town and talking about traffic (different idea but utterly useless: “Here’s a live feed of us stuck in traffic on the DVP!”).

I’ve posted before about how BT gets my ire: particularly Kevin “I Don’t Live In Toronto” Frankish and his need to revolve the show around himself. Even his post-show blog (full of terminology errors – he calls his video posts “blogs”), gets my blood boiling. I’m really glad he’s trying to get on board with the whole Web 2.0, new technology thing but it’s becoming unwatchable, like your parent trying to email a photo off their hard drive (no offense dad!!). I have to admit in the last while, I’ve hopped over to Canada AM and have become dangerously close to accepting their dry, conservative pap as my morning ritual.

Until this morning there was a ray of hope…

This morning during a CP24 bumper, in between the weather and traffic, there were two young somethings chatting amicably about their fantastic weekend and how great the weather was. I missed their names and the segment lasted only a minute, but they got my attention… They were young, well dressed, good looking, bright, smiling, energetic and so NOT like the current Breakfast Television crew, that my heart beat faster.

Is CP24 going to cut loose BT and have their own breakfast show of goodlookings 20-30somethings? I’m hoping that CP24 is grooming young bucks to offer a breath of fresh air from curmudgeonly Kevin “I’m Old and at no way at all a Metrosexual” Frankish? Can Dina transfer over to that show if they do? She’s the only reason I’ve hung on so long.

Last Tango In Jadac

jadac

A friend who knows I’m jonesing for Dexter and Mad Men to return, sent me this online game Last Tango In Jadac, based on the Movie Network’s show ZOS (Zone of Separation). The start of the game introduces a character called Speedo Boy, from which you can guess his costume choice (played deliciously over the top by Enrico Colantoni, who geeks will know as the guy who framed Gigolo Joe in Spielberg’s A.I.), and he invites you to wander the streets of Jadac and meet his people.

Being a newbie to The Movie Network, I’m trying to get as much cool, commercial free stuff in as possible and have watched a couple ZoS to recognize the characters around the game. LTiJ is an “interactive fiction experience” that utilizes 3D graphics as navigation, which takes a bit of getting use to to move around, and Flash video that lets you interact with Jadac’s population. Stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with an almost David Lynchian web adventure: surreal, death defying, unnerving and spatially discordant. It’s probably the best form of Flash/Video marketing I’ve seen in a while.

Moving around the square you meet up with many of the characters of Jadac who all want something from you or need to give you advice, drugs or tasks to complete within the game. Ultimately you’re trying to get out of the ZoS without getting zipped up into a body bag, of which I haven’t been able to finish without finding myself getting unzipped by a couple of Canadian peacekeepers (there’s a seriously frustrating bug in the game within the Speedo Boy/Minefield part – the game refuses to recognize any keyboard commands and you instantly wander where you’re not suppose to – boom, you’re dead). While the concept isn’t new the fusion between story and discovery/exploration is worth some attention and compliments the story well. Some areas of Jadac are not safe for work – you can choose to take on the job of porno cinematographer and film a mildly graphic sex scene (men’s bum, a tit) and some are seriously depressing (dressed down scenes of white slavery) but it does have flashes of fun. The stories shift between events and areas as you wander around interacting with characters, giving you a sense of the dark, almost Catch 22 vibe of the show.

LTiJ is a great marketing tool for the show, even if you’re not a fan. It’s worth a few minutes of your time. Pro tip: If you die, stick around for the credits – the final shot is a nice behind-the-scenes look at how they filmed it.

Best of Clist – Helpful!

Insert RAM jokes here

Naked computer repair / service call by hung man
I offer training sessions were I can teach you how to use certain things on your computer and online from downloading your entertainment to running social pages like MySpace and face book. I can give your computer a tune up so it runs fast again. I check your computer properly for viruses. I can also set up your new computer and transfer over some of the old information you want to keep from your previous system. Well I repair your system I do it in the nude or can dress to your taste. I am a well endowed man. This is a paid computer service call. I am not an escort. I have an average build I am mostly straight but comfortable with my body and I am willing to fix any ones computer in the nude. I travel to you and I can arrange evening appointments to fit your scedual. So why not treat yourself and get more out of your repair mail me for pics and any questions.

My own Korova Milk Bar Fixture

I Can Be Adjusted
Are you a white male that loves to watch TV and have a human footstool under your feet? If you are straight that is fine. If you do not want to have sex that is fine as well. I can be naked or wear clothes. Do you have a buddy and want to play cards together? I can lay on the ground and the both of you can put your feet on me. I will massage them and pamper them. Why rest them on the floor when you can rest them on a live carpet? If you are gay then even better. You can read a book while you ignore me under your feet or do work on your computer while I lay on the floor.
If you want you can watch porn & I will give you the best blow job ever. You do not need to suck me.