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Toronto Pride Parade 2011 – Rob Ford Was There!

There had been concerns that Toronto mayor, Rob Ford, wouldn’t make it down from the family cottage in time to put in an appearance at the Pride Parade. However, as it turns out, the inimitable Mr. Ford was everywhere. Below are some select images I took at the parade. You can view hundreds more on [...]

Will Rob Ford Make it to the Pride Parade?

Rob Ford has been the brunt of heavy criticism for his announcement that he would skip today’s Pride Parade and spend the day, instead, at his family’s cottage.  His brother has said they may make it back in time to take part in the festivities.  Do we really want him there?  What kind of mayor [...]

On the male side of the middle

A couple of years ago, Calvin Neufeld, along with his wife Sharon, came to West Hill United Church to speak about his his experience as a transgendered person (FTM). You can view his talk here or listen to the podcast. Since then, he has produced a short video that offers a glimpse into the life [...]

Jiri Kajane a Hoax

Five months ago I posted a review of Some Pleasant Daydream: The Stories of Jiri Kajane, which has also gone by the title Winter in Tirane.  On Friday, Ian Jack of The Guardian revealed that Jiri Kajane was, in fact, two creative writing students from California named Kevin Phelan and Bill U’Ren.  To explain the [...]

Virgin Alerts Infected Customers

To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC:  Virgin Alerts Infected Customers.  When I first read this headline, my zombie-biased brain immediately assumed the Mother of God had caught a case of rabies or was the bride of [...]

The Guardian’s 100 greatest non-fiction books

Almost as if in answer to my “Full Catastrophe Reading” post of June 13th, The Guardian published “The 100 greatest non-fiction books” on the following day.  In my post, I had suggested that, to read well, we must be fully awake to the texts we encounter.  I applied the principles of mindfulness to reading, and [...]

Charles Dickens Admits Fake Orphan Blog

In a startling revelation today, Charles Dickens confessed to maintaining a blog about an orphan popularly known as “Oliver Twist.”  Mr. Dickens admitted that there is, in fact, no such person as Oliver Twist and that he made him up simply as a way to draw attention to the plight of children in industrialized Britain.  [...]

Speaking in Fake English

What is Tom Waits saying in his song Kommienezuspadt?  It sounds vaguely German, but as far as I can tell, none of it is real.  Or what about Bill Hader as Italian media personality Vinny Vedecci?  He sounds Italian, but it’s kind of a mashup of words pulled from recipe books and bad TV (think [...]

God is Coming, On CD, Vinyl and Download

I spotted this poster three years ago in a Glasgow parking lot. It fired my messianic imagination. Could it be? I wondered. After two thousand years of suspense, could we finally be on the cusp of a second coming? Then I remembered where I was and realized that I had gotten myself all excited for [...]

War on Graffiti Produces Civilian Casualty

The Toronto Star reports that the city has painted over a mural that the city had paid $2,000 to produce.  This sounds vaguely reminiscent of an incident I blogged about two years ago when the Glastonbury council grey washed a Banksy mural which had just been sold to a collector for £5,000.  According to the [...]

Favourite Book Blurbs from Japan

I shouldn’t do this.  I shouldn’t laugh in public at someone else’s writing.  Especially when I’m publishing some of my own work in a couple weeks.  It’s courting disaster.  It’s bad karma.  I might as well step into the crosshairs and pull the trigger on myself.  And yet I can’t help it. I’ve stumbled across [...]

Black is the Colour of my True Love’s Hat

While watching Cathy Berberian sing the Appalachian folk song, Black is the Colour (of my true love’s hair), I noticed something strange.  Sitting in the top right corner of the camera’s field, from :38-:50 and again from 2:10-2:23 is a bearded man wearing a beret.  What is he doing? I wondered.  During the first segment, [...]

The Elephant Brand

Measuring Readability of Blog Posts

I installed a wordpress plugin called FD Word Statistics which applies three metrics on the backend and is supposed to help me gauge the readability of my blog posts.  The first two metrics – Gunning-Fog and Flesch-Kincaid – measure things like sentence length and word bigitude and then crank out a figure that’s supposed to [...]

The Grass is Greener on St. Patrick’s Day

Of the many things that perplexed me today, the most perplexing was the man going from door to door with flyers for lawn care services.  I watched as he went to this house and didn’t even pause to wonder at the lush green grass.  Yes, it is still winter here in Toronto.  What is going [...]