Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
While I was yet a teenager, the Nazis conscripted me to cook for their officers. As sous chef, I had to serve them breakfast. However, I had always been a subversive lad and so I hatched a plot. I would serve the officers omelettes made from rotten eggs and slowly this is how I would…
Certain fire hydrants suffer from performance anxiety, praying each time they hear a siren that the fire truck doesn’t pull up in front of them: “Oh please don’t stop. Please don’t stop. The last time a fire truck stopped here, I pissed a river and had a bladder infection for three weeks.”
The skipping rope was made of green and pink plastic and had tassels at either end. It was long, the kind of skipping rope girls used in the playground at recess.
$200 is a lot of money for a toy monkey, probably more than the purchase price of most toy monkeys. What is so special about this toy monkey that it warrants a $200 reward? Is there a flash drive sewn inside with sensitive intelligence reports? Or drug-filled condoms…
I have a great idea for a new tech startup and am thinking I could finance it with a kickstarter campaign. Maybe $10 would do. I want to develop ass detection software. A specialized algorithm would scan digital photographs and identify all asses. Once the algorithm had learned the generalized task of locating an ass, it would go on to the more specialized task of identifying the “owner” of the ass. I’m proceeding on the assumption that each person has a unique set of identifying markers: shape, roundness, proportions, depth, that sort of thing.
Now, as the weather turns colder, one must take precautions against over-exposure. Photographers, of course, are concerned about over-exposure all year round.
While the official story holds that Ian Fleming named his most famous character after an American ornithologist, local legend tells a different story. In 1942, Fleming spent a few weeks at Camp X near Oshawa where he was taking specialized training (he was leader of a British commando unit). Fleming was staying at a home on Avenue Road, and, every day, on his way to Camp X, he passed a local church, St. James-Bond United Church.
I like to think of the Japanese photographer, Araki, as (among other things) the grandfather of the modern selfie. Photographers have been taking self-portraits since the camera was invented, but Araki makes a regular habit of including himself in his images, and was doing so long before digital photography became a thing.
Last night at TCC (Toronto Camera Club) I got Best In Show in the pictorial competition for the “Altered Reality” category. I call my image “Washing The Stemware.”
At Parliament & Mill Street, at the northwest corner of the distillery district, there’s a wedge-shaped building, and right at the pointy corner of the wedge is a lighting store, and on display in that lighting store is (or was) a mushroom-shaped lamp.
It’s good to see that Dadaism is thriving at construction sites in downtown Toronto. I call it Canadada
I suppose there are different forms of visual jokes, but the one that strikes me most often is a kind of ironic juxtaposition.
I have a thing for visual jokes, ironies, unfortunate circumstances, so I couldn’t resist this scene looking across the Ottawa River from the Gatineau side.
While browsing used titles in Cambridge, / I found an old volume, The Limerick. / Tho not illustrated, / ”Twas unexpurgated / The famous Paris Edition and you get the idea. It’s a consolidation of various sources dating from 1870 to 1952 and even includes one questionable mention of Toronto from 1941